


promises to stay

by revecake



Series: promises made and kept [2]
Category: GOT7
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, Fluff, Found Family, Introspection heavy, M/M, Slice of Life, Snapshots, everyone cries at least (1) time, thanks abo :), where the nature of some sex can be considered dub-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:14:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25481470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revecake/pseuds/revecake
Summary: They commiserate like that over shared pains given and taken for the few moments of cicada cries. Jackson dully huddled over his knees with a leaking nose, and Jinyoung, carefully calm as the alcohol threatens something nasty from inside his stomach..“Don’t go,” he says, the only thing on his mind. “I don’t want you to go.”Jackson shakes like he might cry, but he doesn’t. Jinyoung’s shoulder remains dry beneath his cheek..Later, Jackson keeps his face tucked into Jinyoung’s neck as they sway together on the 2 am subway line. Jaebeom leans into Jackson, and Jackson sleeps on Jinyoung, and Jinyoung resolutely stays upright for the three of them as he hangs by the lone handrail.-domestic life for jackson, jinyoung, jaebeom, and how they tie up, tangle, and lightly singe some emotional ends in the process of learning to coexist in the spaces between.(timestamp post-promises to come back to you).
Relationships: Im Jaebum | JB & Jackson Wang, Im Jaebum | JB/Park Jinyoung, Park Jinyoung & Jackson Wang
Series: promises made and kept [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1766206
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47





	1. one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wOAH *throws work down* i DID IT, I HAVE FINISHED IT  
> I left the previous part of this series on SUCH a note and so...basically this fic has to sort out all the previous messes. remember when this story was just supposed to be focused on abo? haha me neither.  
> anyway jjj hold hands and are happy in a series of timestamps/drabbles :)
> 
> it would be great if you read the previous work in this series first! everything here is just trying to resolve the remaining tensions and complications from that fic so it almost reads very differently lol. but please enjoy!

_how to call it ‘home’ again_

It goes unspoken that Jinyoung moves in with Jaebeom. 

For Jackson, it’s less unspoken and more so completely inscrutable. After all, Jaebeom’s apartment was only meant for two max. 

But after so long, he’s finally holding the edge of Jaebeom’s sleeve again and he can’t let go soon enough at the end of this first day together. So, inevitably, they all collapse wordlessly in the dredges of late afternoon in the same space - Jaebeom and Jinyoung piled atop the bed and each other, and Jackson fitting himself into the familiar couch at the end of it. 

When Jaebeom blinks awake, swollen and stiff in yesterday’s clothing, it’s to Jackson’s sleeping face in the morning light. He still looks so young, without a wrinkle to his brow, haphazardly tossing an arm around his head on the lumpy couch. 

He looks uncomfortable yet intimately familiar with sleeping there. Jaebeom swallows around the ball of emotion in his throat. 

Usually Jackson will sleep over, snuggled tightly at his side. Now it’s Jinyoung wrapped around his back, brow furrowed and latching on with a sharp grip. Jaebeom did promise him _this_ , more than anything — he folds one hand gingerly over Jinyoung’s. 

But he hates that Jackson has gotten used to sleeping on his terrible couch. He imagines Jackson every night, alone for months. And for the months before then, even lonelier without Jaebeom to reassure him.

Jackson hates being alone, always has. Helping him get his own apartment had been a huge step forward, but look at him now. 

Jaebeom hates that he’s ruined it again. 

Jackson is still close enough, just a hands length away. So Jaebeom reaches out and tucks his palm over Jackson’s cheek. It’s warmer that way, and even in his sleep, Jackson turns into his touch. Just like always, Sunday mornings and affectionate grumblings. 

Maybe Jaebeom is hesitant, his hand shaking a little under a halo of sunshine. But he sees how Jackson smiles in his sleep, just like he did when Jaebeom was the one to pull him close, and Jaebeom likes that it makes him look young. 

He likes that Jackson can still look as he did, content to be with Jaebeom. 

Jaebeom’s eyes eventually fall closed, but he’s selfishly holding Jackson to him as he did before - a hand on his cheek from hyung to dongsaeng.

-

Jaebeom leaves them with each other for the day.

“I have to register my badge with the office again, and Jinyoung has to finish moving in.” He’s already at the door, and both of them are tensed as if ready to run after him. Make him stay (Jinyoung) or beg him to take him along (Jackson). 

Jaebeom pauses, and a smile twists over his face. Almost a little disbelieving, wincing. 

He’s turning that smile to Jackson, and God, he’s so weak. “Help him out, okay Jackson?” 

Jinyoung adamantly does not look at the two of them. 

Jackson’s voice escapes him like a whimper. “Okay, hyung.” He waves weakly from his frozen half-crouch. 

Jaebeom waves back, eyes catching somewhere behind Jackson, and then he’s slipping through the door. 

From how quickly he closes it, it’s as if he’s scared they’re going to break into a sprint. 

Maybe Jackson was considering it. And from the way Jinyoung is still staring at the door with a slight tilt to his mouth, he was thinking the same thing. 

…

Jackson doesn’t understand how, for a newly homeless rich boy, Jinyoung still has practically a mansion’s worth of luggage. And it’s not just clothes or appliances - no that’s acceptable, _almost_ practical.  
It’s the fact that there’s not one, not two, but four cooling units. Not just bedside fans but the fancy units with blue light-up screens that swivel around the room at set times. 

Jackson’s fucked up back from countless nights on an empty couch already hurts. He thinks it’s acceptable to glare at Jinyoung’s for a little as they take an eternity of back and forth trips to lug the damn things up to Jaebeom’s apartment. 

Jaebeom’s apartment that has no elevator, mind you. On a 30 degrees kind of day, Jackson can see the sunshine glint of sweat on Jinyoung’s temple.

“Why are you wearing so much?” Jackson wonders aloud before he can stop himself. 

Jinyoung’s glare is scathing in the pure white heat. Coiffed hair falling free, a collared shirt, and a pressed linen coat to match. It would be magazine fresh if Jinyoung was not obviously steaming under all of it.

Jackson looks away, ducking behind the titanium-grade, glorified lamp. “Just asking.” 

Jinyoung’s turned back continues up the stairs, and Jackson realizes - they’re about the same. Tight shoulders, medium height - smaller than Jaebeom. Well, maybe he’s also slightly short of Jinyoung too, but there’s no way under those slim layers he’s got more muscle than Jackson. 

It’s odd. He’s an alpha, but Jackson had practically forgotten in the mess of life rearranging itself around _Jaebeom_. Jinyoung follows as the flash of a dissonant afterthought, but he grows more real with each second trudging up the sunlit stairs. 

The both of them reaching for the door when Jaebeom left, and then away from each other. Hurt somehow in the lonely space of two. 

Alpha or not, Jackson watches him wipe away the sweat on his forehead, and he wonders if they’re just the same. 

… 

Jinyoung disappears into the bedroom to presumably re-arrange his 300 piece clothing line into color-coded perfection. Jackson shifts awkwardly in the living room as he looks at the clutter of knick-knacks littering the floor like expensive household mines. 

The room spills over with things Jaebeom would never buy for himself, things he would never let Jackson give him either.

Jinyoung takes up too much space. Jackson doesn’t know what to do with any of the piles of glossy hardbacks, their titles printed in obscure English font. Jaebeom’s slight Murakami collection is still piled on a neat bedside table. 

Jackson doesn’t think any of Jinyoung’s hefty books would fit there. It’s all out of order. 

Jinyoung emerges from the bedroom, lost. Even when there was no room between two, he fit himself in as the third. Jackson wants to hold a grudge against him for it, and yet. Jinyoung doesn’t belong in his old life as much as Jackson is a total stranger in this new one. 

Beneath the loose hair in his eyes, Jinyoung is simply holding himself together with blotchy cheeks and a shuddering silence. Jackson knows the look of a stray. Too many bedraggled kittens in weed-ridden boxes, and the soft surrender in hyung’s eyes only made it worse when he realized that’s how Jaebeom would look at him too.

“Come on.” He grabs Jinyoung’s bare wrist. Jinyoung seems shocked at his touch, that he would even choose to reach out to him through all his reserved layers. 

“Let’s eat.” Jackson nods adamantly, and he hopes his smile is real enough to convince Jinyoung to follow him. 

Jinyoung stumbles in his tugging grip. “I - I can’t cook.” 

Jackson pulls him along anyway. “Then we’ll buy. My treat.” He pauses, turning to make sure Jinyoung is there somehow because it’s all tension between them and the empty space that Jaebeom left behind. 

Jinyoung nods. “Okay.” He moves, and his wrist remains lightly circled in Jackson’s grip. 

…

Jackson lets go at some point, jerking his hand away in a sudden flash of awareness and sharp magnolia. But even as Jinyoung had quickly avoided his gaze after, it gets easier, if only by a little. 

Jaebeom would probably ban French-Korean pastries as an acceptable lunch food. However, Jackson thinks with a foreign sense of glee, Jaebeom isn’t here right now. He is, somehow, an adult in his own right. 

And if Jinyoung starts crying, then at least there will be sugar to try and divert the panic. 

Jinyoung moves inside the store with stilted, wide-eyed wonder, and Jackson guides him out of the way of other customers with a palm on his back. It’s automatic, just like Jaebeom on dazed Sunday noon-mornings where Jackson gets to affectionately push him around, and hyung won’t say anything, except ease into his touch. 

Strangely, Jinyoung doesn’t flinch away. He’s focused on the menu with an odd amount of concentration, but then again - Jackson feels like he’s the type of person to do everything with such focus. Just a hunch. 

“Strawberry cream, please, and-”

Jinyoung shifts awkwardly up to his side. “Red bean bread.” 

Jackson has to hold in a snort as the cashier fumbles with his card. Jinyoung’s round eyes flit over to him for the moment, and Jackson slaps the receipt into his hand before he can say anything. 

\--

“She was totally checking you out, you know.” Jackson tears open the creamy packaging and bites into the collective sandwich of strawberry, cream, and toasted bread. Habitual Sunday morning freshness for a stilted Saturday afternoon. 

Jinyoung looks troubled for a moment before switching to a glare. He decidedly ignores Jackson to delicately peel back the wrapping of his simple bun. 

In any other situation, Jinyoung is one of those pretty boys Jackson would have teased mercilessly. For the way he sits, prim and cross-legged with even, lightly held shoulders, to the measured pace of his neat bites. 

Jackson sprawls back against his seat, foot propped against his knee. He thinks he and Jinyoung might have gotten along like a house on fire - in any other kind of life. 

Park Jinyoung is a classic kind of handsome with something a bit more sensitive to his delicate eyes. Jackson can begrudgingly admit that. It’s why he had laughed about the cashier the way he did. But that also means, Jaebeom-hyung, well - Jackson’s head aches at the natural conclusion, and he regrets bringing it up now. 

“Thanks.” Jackson blinks a little. Jinyoung pushes the receipt across the table, stopping at the invisible line between them. 

“Ah,” Jackson takes it just as Jinyoung retreats. “Just treat me next time.” 

That gets Jinyoung to look at him, _really_ look at him. Jackson leans back, waving the receipt with a hint of teeth to his smile.

“I’m not Jaebeom-hyung, okay? Pay me back for my hard-earned wages.” 

Surprisingly, Jinyoung smiles too. In the cafe, slowing with a hush in the post-noon work rush, he softens in the fading light. It’s just a wry tilt of his curved lips, but Jackson knows what he’s thinking. 

“Obnoxious.” 

“I know right,” Jackson immediately parrots back. “It’s like he’s got something to prove.” 

They laugh at that, one stilted rhythm following another. Not quite together, but it’s shared somehow. They’re the same age, Jackson remembers as Jinyoung lightly covers his mouth, deep whiskers curling from his eyes. 

They’re the same age, and yet, Jinyoung is distinctly different from Jackson’s dongsaeng-to-Jaebeom’s-hyung. 

The atmosphere falters between them again. Jackson idly crumples the receipt in his palm as he wonders if hyung is already on his way back from rooftop _kimbap_ lunch. Jinyoung is staring at the menu boards again, eyes scanning back and forth. 

Unbidden, Jackson guesses at his thoughts. “Do you want to buy a cake for hyung?”

Jinyoung startles guiltily with a flicker of his eyes, parted lips. Then, he concedes with quiet avoidance. “...I don’t have my card on me.” 

Jackson is already bustling up to the counter again, the same flustered employee meeting his eyes and avoiding Jinyoung’s.

“You should get the Cloud Cream with strawberries,” Jackson nudges his head at the option even as Jinyoung seems very set on his own pre-made decision. 

He pushes a little harder with a feigned whisper. “Hyung loves milk cream,” and his fingers tap around Jinyoung’s wrist, somehow connected again. 

Jinyoung is already jerking Jackson’s card out of his fingers and swiping. “One slice of Cloud Cream #2, please.” He stares at Jackson, daring him to say anything. Their raised arms hang by Jackson’s grip, and like clockwork, Jackson drops Jinyoung in the beat of a breath. 

The cashier looks between them with tentative interest. “Would you like that packaged as a gift?”

Jinyoung glances at Jackson. Jackson shrugs, _suit yourself_. Jaebeom would always buy, and by the end of their walk back, they would have finished whatever it was between them already. 

“Yes, please.” 

And Jackson can’t help it, he nudges at Jinyoung, and the other man seems more than a little tolerant of him with a crinkle of his round eyes. 

-

“Here,” Jackson shoves the bag at Jinyoung. It rustles in the wind of passing cars, hanging at a standstill as Jinyoung simply turns, not moving to take it but not refusing either. 

Jackson drops it into his hand anyway, and Jinyoung’s arm jolts with the sudden weight. It may be just one slice of cake, but heavy cream is surprisingly dense. Jaebeom-hyung loves it though, _will_ love it when Jinyoung is the one to give it to him.

Jackson tries to smile past the bitterness. “Make sure to tell hyung we split the pay, okay? That way he can take a hint and stop feeling like he has to prove how he’s older and more competent or something.” 

Jinyoung tentatively brings the bag to himself, and the heavy packaging with its pink craft ribbons and cut corners presses through the cute translucent logo. It’s something Jaebeom would let himself go a little weak for with a fluttering smile and then immediately turn around and scold Jackson for wasting his money.

His own money, that he has earned at Jaebeom’s side, mind you. 

At the bottom of hyung’s apartment complex, Jackson waves Jinyoung goodbye. Jinyoung tilts back, passing surprise on his face. He glances at the stairs, then back to Jackson, as if asking him to come up, to sit for a while in what used to be home.

Jackson shuffles in place, scuffing his heels into the sidewalk. “Tell Jaebeom-hyung I said hi, okay?” 

Jackson already misses Jaebeom. The warmth of hyung’s palm on his cheek this morning had woken him from a doze. He had wanted more suddenly, to be the one who could nose into the dip of his neck, wriggle around him unabashedly as an excuse to try and smooth out the lumpy parts of the bed. He wants to greet him now still, fall into him after a long day at work.

Jackson watches Jinyoung’s back disappear between the sunshine blur of metal railings, and he thinks about how the other’s sleek shoulders almost match his own, the way they fit right against Jaebeom’s.

(There’s simply no space left for him now).

Jinyoung is a tan dot waving from the top of the landing. Jackson catches his goodbye with a cheery smile and tries not to dwell on the flickers of city nightlights in his empty room at night. 

-

“Where’s Jackson?”

Jaebeom is toeing off his shoes, and his glasses are slipping loose beneath his short hair, and Jinyoung just wants to pull the other man into himself. Forget the confusions of today, the brittle touch to Jackson’s company that felt strange and all too familiar. He’s simply been waiting for Jaebeom to come home again. 

Instead, he’s still left holding the boxed cake, cutting a harsh impression against his chest. He holds it out now, a poor replacement for the person. “He...bought this for you, and he says - hi.” 

Ah, he forgot what Jackson told him to say earlier. It all sounds stilted coming from him anyway. Jaebeom sighs in place. He turns to the door, as if looking beyond it, and then shakes his head to himself. 

“That kid-,” he takes the box from Jinyoung, and even as he’s smiling at him, the fondness in his tone is reserved for someone else. 

He grows that much fonder, more exasperated when he pulls open the ribbon, folds back the corners to reveal a slice of cake, cut in smooth white cream with a bloom of candied strawberries on top. 

“I used to buy the cloud cream ones for him,” Jaebeom murmurs, playing with an extra dot of frosting on his fingers. Jinyoung is right here, beside him, and yet, he feels distinctly distant. 

Then, his gaze is turned on Jinyoung. “Did you guys really go to a pastry shop for lunch?” When Jaebeom scolds, the effect is immediate, and Jinyoung resents having to take Jackson’s punishment in his place. 

“...No.” Jinyoung does his best to look earnest.

Jaebeom sees through him anyway. Not with anger or frustration, but always with a well-worn kind of patience. A knowing tilt of his head as he closes his eyes for the moment. 

Jaebeom elects to ignore his lie by shoving a forkful of cake at him. “Eat.” 

Jinyoung glumly swallows around the taste of pure sugar. _Definitely_ too sweet. He winces away from the next proffered bite. 

Jaebeom grumbles as he scoops the rest of the cake into his mouth with large, solid bites. Jinyoung is slightly stuck on the way he lets the same fork linger in his mouth, almost sucking on the last bits with a little twist between his brows. 

“-can’t believe, he would spend money on packaging of all things and not even stay to give it to me-” 

He shoves the final tower of cream and puffed bread into his mouth, huffing in clear enjoyment. “And he didn’t even stop by after work,”

Jinyoung tries to find the right words to defend someone he barely knows. “I thought he would come in,” 

Jaebeom cuts right past him. “Next time don’t eat sweets for lunch and _tell him_ to wait for me - God, I can’t believe-” He tosses a hand through his hair, and the short ends ruffle too easily, sticking up in a light puff. Compared to the heavy layers from before, it’s almost foreign. To both of them.

Jinyoung immediately tenses at the idea of another stilted interaction with Jackson, where the only thing between them had been _Jaebeom_. 

“Why does it have to be me?” He mumbles, looking off to the side. 

Jaebeom’s fussy anger fades into the press of a glossy, sugared kiss to his brow. The first kiss, touch even, since Jinyoung had been stuck for months in a shuttered room with only the knowledge of Jaebeom on the other side of those clinical blue walls. His breath stutters, and he thinks he can feel the erratic beat of his heart in his cheeks. 

“Because you’re my precious dongsaeng, both of you. Get along with him, okay?” He refers to them in that doting tone, as if they were one and the same, equal in his affections. 

He can almost taste the lasting sweetness from the cake on Jaebeom’s whisper. Maybe that’s the only thing that convinces him to try again, with someone who pulls him along without hesitation and yet seems to keep his own inscrutable distance. Someone who Jaebeom holds just as dearly. 

“He’s actually a softie. You’ll see soon enough.” 

Jinyoung remembers the strained cheer in Jackson’s eyes and tries to believe him. 

-

Jinyoung nervously fingers the mismatched blankets in his lap. Cotton, wool, and something else, worn and comfortable with a mix of scents that drape over the cool touch of his pajamas. He can already feel an itch at the base of his ankle from the edge of the mattress, left uncovered by the fitted sheet. 

Simply, he doesn’t know if he can sleep. The other night, he had simply passed out - they all had. But this time, he’s so aware of how awake he is. Where he is now. 

The scratchy sheets unlike his own, the scents that say _Jackson &Jaebeom_, and his own, bitter and too sharp in the heavy warmth of fragrant oil and unfurling lemon-grass. 

“Still awake?” Jaebeom is all puffy hair, slow blinks, and a loose figure in a yellow t-shirt and black shorts. Beneath woven silk, Jinyoung sweats a little. 

Jaebeom fiddles with the lamp at his bedside, shaky and at an uneven level atop its base of paperback books. It takes a few moments before the low glow fades entirely into the quiet. 

Still, Jinyoung has learned that nights in the city are busy, and Jaebeom’s eyes glitter in the moonlight through the open window. 

He crawls over to Jinyoung’s side, and there must be something with his face, because Jaebeom pauses, kneeling with a stilted laugh. 

“I’m not going to bite, you know. Just lay down.” 

Jinyoung huffs, but at Jaebeom’s palm on his chest, he wriggles beneath the covers. He thinks he’s still too nervous to sleep, but Jaebeom fits himself over the line of Jinyoung’s arm, and those unspoken fears melt a little. Jaebeom is touching him, his hand thrown lightly across his chest, his hair brushing against Jinyoung’s brow, and Jinyoung - he’s allowed to return the touch. 

The shift of his clothing beneath the blankets as he turns is harsh enough to make him wince. But he closes his eyes and digs his nose into Jaebeom’s collarbone, and the resulting curl of fingers over his shoulder makes him set aside some of his regrets. 

“I might.” 

Jaebeom makes a throaty noise, already half-asleep. “Please don’t.”

It’s a joke made in poor taste, especially between the two of them, but Jinyoung finds himself breathing a ticklish exhale into Jaebeom’s neck anyway. 

It’s good, just as heart-aching and gut-wrenching as ever. Lemon-cake, sweeter than that obnoxious cream cake, with a warm undercurrent of spice. Peppercorn fragrance. Jackson. 

The bed smells like it’s Jackson’s as much as it’s Jaebeom’s. And Jinyoung is simply here, the sharp edge of magnolia curling up in the foreign space between them. He can’t forget the way Jackson had stood there, gazing up at the landing even after he had said goodbye. 

Jinyoung had tentatively waved to him, but that wasn’t what Jackson had been waiting for. _Who_ he had been hoping for. 

He can’t sleep. 

“Jaebeom.” 

Jaebeom breathes in deeply, his voice coming out thick and slurred a moment later. “What is it?”

“You should talk to Jackson - about what happened, about me and you, about-”

And what else - he can’t put it into exact words. It just feels like a distant revolving space of _me_ and _you_ and _him_ , where even the presence of two inevitably spills over into three. At the same time, it’s too far and yet too full. 

Jaebeom’s fingers run through his hair, cradling Jinyoung to his chest. Even breaths, up and down, up and down. 

Jinyoung almost thinks he’s passed out when Jaebeom replies. “I will. I won’t leave him behind.”

And in the low hum of his promise ( _I_ _won’t leave you either)_ , the washing lull of fingers against his neck, Jinyoung falls asleep. 

-

Morning comes with Jackson’s bright smile at the door, and already at 10 am, it’s too early for Jinyoung. 

He runs a hand through what must be poofy pillow hair, and Jackson seems to get the gist of his half-asleep murmurings without him saying anything. 

He taps his knuckles against the open frame. “Hyung told me to walk you to school today.”

Jinyoung is definitely not awake because his automatic response is to rub at the clammy skin beneath his eyes and groan, “Ugh, you again.”

Jackson freezes in his casual lean, and Jinyoung realizes his mistake -

“I didn’t mean-”

Jackson cuts him off with a thin, barely-there grin. “Hyung already put in a sick day for me.” He turns, lacing his hands behind his head, and it’s not what this is about at all, but he gives Jinyoung an easy out anyways. “Just treat me to lunch for today.” 

He sends a sideways glance at Jinyoung’s shirt, and it’s still unbuttoned half-way down his chest from last night. — Too hot, he had jerked up in Jaebeom’s embrace only for their hands to tangle clumsily over his buttons. 

“-mm, hyung,”

“Got it,” and Jaebeom had pulled open the collar, soothing his fingers over bare collarbones. It was still warm, too smothering, but Jinyoung had immediately buried his face back into Jaebeom’s neck again, falling asleep to the bare scent there. 

Jackson looks away innocently, and Jinyoung yanks his shirt closed. 

...

On the morning metro, Jinyoung doesn’t know how to stand next to Jackson. They crowd into one another, bordered by school girls covering their legs on tiny window seats and black suits weaving between the hanging handrails. 

Up close, Jinyoung can smell the exact traces of spice and warmth lingering on Jaebeom’s bed from last night. Jackson’s shoulder bumps into his chest with the next sway of the train, and his eyes remain even and shut, as if simply dozing in the sun.

Jinyoung doesn’t understand him. The young beta with strong shoulders, stubborn cheeks, and a heady scent that seems so perpetually intertwined with Jaebeom’s own. 

But then Jackson blinks, startling, and they’re looking at each other with such careful, reaching gazes, and he supposes — Jackson must be thinking the same thing about him. 

On the late morning train, they crowd closer than is comfortable, but there’s at least one tentative smile between them. 

\--

“You smell like Jaebeom-hyung,” Jackson says, unprompted. Wary and curious as he swings around in the sunlit street, hands in his pockets. 

“Well,” Jinyoung states, “so do you.” 

That gets something honest out of him. Pause, surprise at least. Jackson stares at him for a moment longer before leading the way down the bustling city road. Jinyoung follows, wondering what that means for the both of them. 

\--

“You’re still here?” Jinyoung ducks out past the gates of his university to see Jackson leaning against the bus station where he had left him this morning. On top of the prolonged talk with the dean about his “past history,” which had practically been nothing but thin air with bursts of smoke, the inevitable pushback of his semester, Jackson’s presence makes his already aching head spin. 

“Lunch,” the other man says simply. 

Jinyoung has no other choice but to follow. 

He pays for Jackson’s cheap spaghetti carbonara topped with disgusting amounts of cheese in a store-side restaurant. 

“We should get groceries for Hyung.” Jackson mentions, his cheeks stuffed full, cream oozing over his lips. 

Jinyoung snaps out of his gross, cheese-induced haze. “Jaebeom can’t cook.”

Jackson looks sharply offended, whether at the comment against hyung’s cooking abilities or at the lack of an honorific. It’s true though - Jinyoung has no regard for either. 

“ _I_ can,” he spoons one last soggy bite into his mouth. He chews thoughtfully before smiling widely at Jinyoung. “I’ll teach you the only thing I can make. Hyung’s favorite.”

“What is it-” Jinyoung is asking, already rising to his feet. 

Jackson packs the meal neatly into the container, closing off the used napkins and spoons with a neat snap of the lid. He looks up at Jinyoung, teeth peeking out against his bottom lip - a secret between two kids. 

He takes Jinyoung’s wrist in hand again. “Come on, I’ll show you.” And Jinyoung can’t help but trust his grip, the only concrete thing between them and their silent glances. 

…

Jinyoung finds that _sundubu jjigae_ with islands of soft, melting tofu in boiling hot stew is not just eaten in the chill of winter and only mildly spiced for a weaker tongue. 

“Hyung _loves_ it,” Jackson says by way of scolding him when he voices such thoughts aloud. To prove his point, he dumps a generous helping of hot _gochujang_ into the busy stew of shrimp, clam, and mushroom. 

Jinyoung fiddles with his hands at Jackson’s side, scrunching his nose at the strong mix of pepper and raw seafood. 

He had been banned, _absolutely_ from doing anything in the kitchen after Jackson had given him the vegetables to wash. 

Apparently, soaking them in hot water was not enough for a thorough cleaning. 

(“Ah~what are you even doing,” Jackson says after some busy bustling - pot, water, all heated and ready on the stove - only to find Jinyoung staring expectantly at a bowl of floating spring onions. 

“Cleaning?” 

Jackson elbows him aside, sleeves rolled up, and he dunks all the free water out of the bowl. “Jinyoung, you have to actually _wash_ them.”)

Jackson had proceeded to dig into all the folds of those onions under the running faucet and every other piece of raw food after, leaving Jinyoung to watch apprehensively. Jackson is oddly skilled at maneuvering around the kitchen - skilled at maneuvering Jinyoung out of the way too as he swivels around him with a light palm on his waist here, a nudge to his elbow there.

Jinyoung simply stands there, stiffly wondering if there’s something Jackson can’t do. 

“Is that homemade _jjigae_?”

Jackson whips up from the steaming pot, and these are the moments Jinyoung feels like he’s seeing someone else entirely. A flicker of another time in a past he wasn’t part of, stuck on a cut film reel. 

“Hyung!”

Jackson lights up, and if he’s the sun, then Jaebeom is the moon, and meanwhile, Jinyoung is just the dust of the night left in their wake. It’s not hard to imagine, the way they would come home to each other. It’s like Jinyoung can see it, the habits of a relationship turned over through years and years of gravitational pull.

Then, Jaebeom’s eyes slide over to him as Jackson seems to physically halt between them, and Jinyoung realizes why Jackson reaches out to him with such strain.

He’s that space in the bed that smells like the two of them, the distance of those inevitable months. The pause and pull. Life goes on, but not in the same way after that kind of sudden crash and burn. 

Jaebeom smiles at him, eyes creasing, and Jinyoung can’t help it. He brushes past Jackson to take Jaebeom’s hand instead. 

It’s not an embrace, but his heart pounds at touching Jaebeom, at the way Jaebeom’s cheeks push even further into his eyes. 

“Missed you.” He says it softly, the closest he comes to telling Jaebeom how lost he feels. The closest he comes to outright pulling Jaebeom to him so he can fall into him, hide inside his arms. 

“Yeah,” Jaeeom’s answer is an equally fond whisper. “Did you help Jackson cook?” He runs his thumb across Jinyoung’s palm as if looking for a trace of work in the cushy lines there. 

“Hyung - he can’t even wash onions properly.” Jackson re-inserts himself, tugging on Jaebeom’s arm. “You have to help me if we’re ever going to finish the _jjigae_ on time.”

Because Jaebeom is Jaebeom, he hums, “ _okay, okay,_ ” and lets himself be pushed into place before the chopping board. In his fitted suit jacket and glasses, he starts dicing up some onions as Jackson leans against the counter right next to him under the pretense of watching the pot. 

Jinyoung begrudgingly has to take his place next to Jackson. Somewhere, between Jackson propping himself up by his elbows to watch Jaebeom slowly make clumsy chunks out of vegetables, and Jinyoung teetering over Jackson to do the same thing, their hips bump ever so often in a funny conga line.

“See,” Jackson says, catching him in the act. “Hyung can cook.” 

It’s almost comfortable when Jinyoung lets himself jostle against Jackson’s shoulder, when he scoffs automatically. “I don’t think _that_ counts.”

Jaebeom stops momentarily, knife paused over misshapen cabbage slices. He tilts past Jackson’s shoulder to squint at Jinyoung. “For someone who can’t even wash onions, you sure are loud.” 

Jackson “ _oohs_ ” lowly at his side, Jaebeom hacks up the rest of the vegetables to Jinyoung’s silence, and the _sundubu jjigae_ is eventually finished with Jackson at the helm. 

...

“Jackson-ah,” Jaebeom sighs, sleepy, soft, and full of fondness, all wrapped up in a slow brush of lashes and an easy smile, “stay over tonight?” 

Jackson shakes his head, looking over at Jinyoung. He smiles, a small flicker, and Jinyoung supposes it’s meant for him, as some kind of understanding. He doesn’t get it though, not when Jackson and Jaebeom both seem sad and frustrated in turn and look away from one another. 

Jackson stands up, brushing perfunctorily over his trousers. “Gotta work early tomorrow, hyung.”

Jaebeom rises to meet him, swaying towards him as if Jackson might disappear with the next word. “What are you talking about, huh? We can go together.” 

Jackson’s entire body seems to strain at the intimation of Jaebeom’s touch. His smile is so thin, barely stretching past his cheeks, and Jinyoung wonders how Jaebeom doesn’t see. How much Jackson hurts from wanting, as he pushes himself away. 

“Hyung, you have to know how uncomfortable your couch is.” Jackson sticks out his tongue, but he’s folding his hands behind his back, keeping himself from stepping any closer. “I’m not sleeping there again.”

He leans back into himself, as if physically withdrawing. For once, it’s Jaebeom pushing, Jackson pulling away, and the sound of something brittle between them. 

Jaebeom looks at him, strange and confused, because it’s natural that Jackson should share the bed, should curl into his space uninvited or not, and he wants to argue out loud, but Jinyoung stops him. 

“Jackson’s tired,” Jinyoung grips Jaebeom’s shoulder, glittering stare meeting Jackson’s, hesitation curling behind Jaebeom’s ear in a slow exhale. “We should let him go for tonight.” 

Jaebeom, trapped by his grip and the urge to pull Jackson to him, stills. Jackson looks away, shoulder cutting into the frame of the doorway. Jinyoung doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t press, but his hand stays, a reminder of what’s still here.

Jaebeom shrugs him off, and it’s not hard or even a rejection. But Jinyoung lets him slip away, watches him wrap Jackson up in an embrace, and Jackson has to tilt back a little to fit. Surprise, aching comfort, and numbing hesitation as his hands hover for a moment.

Then, surrender. Jinyoung sees the way he buries his face into Jaebeom’s neck, the desperation as he frowns, squeezes his eyes shut, and noses into the bare skin there. It hurts because Jinyoung would have done the same thing, and he can feel it, the warmth and heat of soft lemon-grass beneath his lips. 

Jackson had been the one to pull him in that day, the one to allow him to cling to Jaebeom. 

But now, he looks like he needs Jaebeom, and only him for a moment.

Jackson’s fingers curl into Jaebeom’s jacket, his nice, pressed shirt collar, and he smiles just barely at something Jaebeom murmurs against his cheek. 

Jinyoung doesn’t know what to do. How do you make it hurt less when even the tightest hug doesn’t help? Jinyoung watches, waits, and even as Jackson shoots him a quick smile by the door, he doesn’t know if he should have let him leave alone tonight. 

Jaebeom stands there, and Jinyoung steps into the empty space against his chest, but distinctly, there’s a third missing in the night. 

-

_Jaebeom, Jackson has something to tell you._

Jinyoung shifts in bed, tucking and re-tucking his arm under his head. Jaebeom’s shoulder rises above the blanket and slowly falls again, deep asleep. 

_Jaebeom, you’re not just his hyung._

He’s close enough to touch. For Jinyoung to pull him, back to front, and rub his scent into his neck, until the bedroom begins to smell like a garden smothered in magnolia and blooming lemon-grass between them. Jaebeom’s legs are already tangled between his, and Jinyoung is all too aware at 2 am of how the crooks of their knees are soft and warm, sliding into place.

_Jaebeom, I don’t think I belong between the two of you._

Jinyoung’s breath stirs the light hairs on Jaebeom’s nape, small and fine now. Jaebeom huffs in his sleep, and maybe Jinyoung wants to shake him awake by the shoulder, tell him the words he’s been mouthing silently above his skin. 

But then there’s the moonlit hint of a plastered scar by the side of his neck, and Jinyoung is still an alpha, and Jaebeom unwillingly wears his bite. It’s still his question of how he can touch Jaebeom again, even as Jaebeom smooths his own fingers around his cheeks, his lips across his brow in the contentment of morning - Jinyoung remembers the heat between them and he can’t help but _want_. 

Jaebeom is close enough to have, to hold, but Jinyoung falls asleep on his own, frowning as his arm goes numb. 

-

It’s sunny skies today, and in some way it’s a celebration for Jackson and Jaebeom to share the same lunch-time _kimbap_ after Jaebeom’s return. 

Youngjae had met their hesitant departure at noon with a _look_ and nothing else. The office only stirs, barely rising to the same level of activity as before. 

Iced coffee and two packs of banana milk sit between them. Jackson had smiled sheepishly and handed his own over. Bad habit, he supposes. He’s gotten used to buying an extra in the past months, leaving it on his desk to sip throughout the afternoon, if only to remind himself of the day it had spilled all over them, sweet and thick on hyung’s lips. 

Jaebeom idly opens one now, letting the straw dangle from his mouth. 

They don’t talk about much - “ _the kimbap is still the same isn’t it-”, “i think so, hyung”_ \- and the rising summer breeze fills more empty space either of them are used to. 

Jaebeom doesn’t meet his eyes, so Jackson lets himself stare openly in the silence. 

The jagged haircut leaves him with thick bangs over his forehead, but the sides of his neck bare. Still, he peers over the thick rims of his usual office glasses. It’s like two people transposed over and onto one another.

Hyung is still so - so _him_. 

Jackson wishes he could draw out two boxes, what’s changed and what hasn’t, neatly define everything about Jaebeom and then fit himself into the space where he belongs. 

Because, beyond this Jaebeom, the one who walks with him to work in the early sunshine and dotes on him over shared food, Jackson sees Jaebeom’s trapped hands clawing at his own fingers, the pale stretch of his body tattooed with bruises before his eyes. _Hyung is an omega_ , he had truly realized in that moment, guilt like a crime. 

He still remembers, how desperately Jaebeom cried. His hyung - nothing more, nothing less. 

If it’s guilt that’s rising to meet the flat coffee in his throat, Jackson doesn’t understand why he keeps replaying that image again. That moment of sudden violence. 

He doesn’t remember being angry, just, just blind. A blind determination to be in every part of Jaebeom’s life, he supposes. 

And look where that’s gotten him now. Two to three, with Park Jinyoung’s dark, quiet eyes seeing through him as he tries to smile into the space he puts between him and Jaebeom. 

Jackson blinks, suddenly aware of how bright the sky is and the blue beneath white seems to burn, searing beneath his eyelids.

“Jackson?” 

Jaebeom holds a piece of _kimbap_ beneath his nose, his own brand of determined worry, and automatically, Jackson opens his mouth. 

“You weren’t eating. Here, eat-” Jaebeom fusses, already picking at another slice from Jackson’s untouched carton. 

“I am now hyung,” Jackson whines as he chews, but when Jaebeom sharply prompts him with another roll pressed to his lips, he’s already opening up to take it again.

Somehow, Jaebeom feeds him his entire lunch, roll by roll, and Jackson lets him. It’s almost nice like this, he thinks of nothing because it’s always interrupted by another mouthful as Jaebeom’s earnest face comes so close to his own. 

When he’s finished, distantly aware of the numb feeling filling his stomach, and Jaebeom is sipping at his second pack of banana milk, Jaebeom calls him again with that careful affection:

“Jackson-ah.”

Jackson answers, as always, like his heart is casually on the line. “Mm, hyung?”

Jaebeom props his chin in his palm as he crosses his legs. In the full noon hour, he folds into himself with little uneven blinks, sleep slurring his words. 

“We should go out this Friday.” It’s less of a request because when hyung looks at him with that half-lidded smile, Jackson knows it’s good as done.

He hums again, already falling into the same easy rhythm. “Where to?”

“You know the downtown night district, the one with speakers all along the street market centers?” Jaebeom’s smile takes on a tender edge, and - oh, Jackson realizes why - “I think Jinyoung would enjoy it.”

Jackson can’t process any of the strange emotions in his chest, because Jaebeom is bumping their knees together, his tongue peeking out against his teeth in a tease. “We should show him how to actually have fun.” 

Jackson snorts because he has no idea how someone like Park Jinyoung defines _fun_. “For sure,” he affirms, nodding to Jaebeom’s muffled laugh. 

It’s easy after that. Sunny sky, banana milk fragrance on hyung’s skin, and the way they nudge into one another in the empty stairwell like they can’t quite balance on their own. 

Easy, until Jaebeom pauses, and Jackson has to hold his breath. 

“Sseun-ah,” and Jaebeom only calls him that when he’s drunk on afternoon sunshine and will let Jackson cuddle him into oblivion - or when he’s _really_ feeling affectionate and uninhibited in his doting as a hyung. 

His hand is so warm on Jackson’s shoulder, his eyes practically slits in the sunlight. “Thank you for taking care of Jinyoung. I don’t think you understand, but he, he needs someone like you.” 

Jackson doesn’t understand how Jinyoung would need anything else when Jaebeom is a given in his life. It was the same for him, after all.

Instead, he holds his heart in his mouth and tells Jaebeom, “It’s nothing at all. I want to be there.” 

_For him. For you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're gonna chug along until we're out of angst territory don't u worry. please let me know how the chapter was for u!!!! 
> 
> hmu! [*](https://twitter.com/happycakecries)


	2. two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gonna be honest, all these j names are starting to make my eyes blurrrr. Ref for jjj city adventures is Pantone 1815C in [this](https://yuqyxom.tumblr.com/post/623189815587979264/its-a-beautiful-sky-bonus) gifset!

_can’t stop staring at you, that’s what five shots could turn me into_

Jinyoung feels like a little kid again, all dressed up in his nice trousers and pressed coat as he has to stop himself from bouncing on the bed. Or at least - he assumes that’s how he would feel in any other life. Childhood conventions, he reminisces with a lasting hint of pain. 

Jackson openly slides into place next to him, and Jinyoung dips with the mattress. Jackson takes the chance to whisper loudly in his ear. 

“Told you hyung likes to get all pretty when he goes out.” 

That’s one way to put it. Preening seems to fit better. Jaebeom fusses with his hair in the mirror just to see it settle. A little lighter, but just the same as bed-mornings or work-afternoons. 

The lip gloss is new. The color glistens a nude pink across the slick seam of his mouth. 

So is the starched black shirt that pinches at the waist, right where the same black pants begin to hug his hips. Jaebeom leaves the shirt open low, a little too low, leading into the hint of his chest. Jinyoung thinks he’s really preening now as Jackson bounds away from the bed. He turns slightly and the tiny studs in his ears glint with the smooth stretch of his mouth. 

Is it an omega thing? He’s not usually someone who would show off like this. It would certainly embarrass Jaebeom if he asked. He wonders, watching Jackson flap his hands around Jaebeom without touching, his own cheeks flushed in excitement, if the beta would agree. 

“You’re not going all out?” Jackson seems to pout at something unseen on the highest part of Jaebeom’s cheek. 

Jaebeom tilts his chin up, wincing, and there’s a third silver stud to match in his nose. “No, it hurts after too long.” 

He finds Jinyoung staring, and he pulls at his earring, a wide bashful smile on his lips. 

Jinyoung steps up to meet the pair - Jackson in a white t-shirt and bleached jeans, the sleeves cropped at the swell of his biceps, and Jaebeom in stark black. Jinyoung left, Jackson right, and Jaebeom in the middle, somehow sharper, smaller with the details of three piercings and grapefruit pink on his lips. 

“Look at you,” Jaebeom teases, pinching the sleeve of his coat. “All dressed up.”

“I should be the one saying that.” Jinyoung doesn’t mean for it to come out so seriously, for his voice to suddenly dip as it does. 

But it makes Jaebeom pause, his fingers above Jinyoung’s arm. He looks at him, wide-eyed, the soft part of his mouth open and vulnerable. Then, barely, imperceptibly, he tilts his neck before Jinyoung. 

Even as his own face flushes, Jinyoung responds alike: “You look good, hyung.”

Jaebeom catches somewhere between embarrassment and deep satisfaction, but Jinyoung can see the hint of a twitching smile as he brushes his wrist over his cheek. 

Is it _his_ approval that’s making Jaebeom like this? 

Jackson pulls him in by that same arm, leaning around Jaebeom. “Seriously, why do you wear so much?”

“Summer nights in the city get cold.” Jinyoung takes in Jackson’s bared arms and the dip of Jaebeom’s collarbones, and he can’t help but think of them as such a pair. 

Matching smiles and the promise of excitement as Jackson starts, and Jinyoung allows himself to be pulled along by the momentum, by Jaeeom’s hand tucked securely in the crook of his elbow. 

He can’t help it, he wants to match the pair as a perfect third. 

-

The subway ride is distinctly different from Jackson and Jinyoung’s quiet morning affair. They crowd closer than they have to because there is no hesitation this time with all three of them here. 

Jaebeom maps out a route through tight streets and new-era neon signs that compete with the shambling edges of the old district on his phone. He and Jackson are cheek to cheek as the screen shifts with images Jinyoung can’t catch in the reflection of their eyes. It all blurs with the city lights outside, the glow of bustling life from the mismatched apartments cutting into one another’s corners for space. 

Occasionally Jaebeom pauses in his whispers with Jackson to glance over at him. A bare flicker of his lids, a smile that only he sees.

Somehow, with no idea of where to go, Jinyoung ends up at the front of their little party. 

In the absence of Yoongi, and of course his car, Jinyoung has been learning the ins and outs of metropolitan subway stations. Rising on the escalator, he watches the thin stream of people pass in and out of the open tunnel. On Friday nights like this, it’s an unsteady rhythm, but it’s bound to swell soon. 

Jackson sprawls across the opposing handrail, and Jaebeom is probably making sure he doesn’t slide off with the moving escalator - but it’s strange, Jinyoung can’t stop staring at the worn posters of restaurant adverts, of women whose flawless faces are ruined by the tears of gritty red tile showing through their pale skin. 

The strips of overhead lights are lurid, flickering with the dust of neglect and old moth bodies, and Jinyoung feels the air clamor over his skin, unrelenting with the smell of oil and something like sharp metal. 

The city at the end of the tunnel approaches, and despite every foreign sensation, Jinyoung wants to run for it. 

Jaebeom and Jackson do. They flank him with erratic steps and then pass him entirely. The echo of their shoes stand out in the murmured hush of the subway, but there is the hint of a wave, of music and voices pushing over at the very edge, where the mouth of the tunnel opens into the derelict downtown. 

Jackson turns first, walking backwards with a determined look that seems to urge at Jinyoung - _faster,_ impatient yet awaiting. Jaebeom’s shirt wrinkles tightly around his shoulders as he stretches to tap the top of the doorway. 

When he succeeds, he twists, stumbling back on his heels with a kind of joyous aftershock, and Jinyoung steps forward to meet him — and the rest of the city rises in return. 

It’s life, in the messiest of ways. The high-rise skyline of billboards advertising anything from pachinko parlors to hair salons is at odds with the tiny, shimmering stalls crowding the barest edges of the street. A man on a bike streaks across the road with no regard for the smooth voice of the oncoming traffic light. It’s night now, but the imitation of Hong Kong lights glows brighter than the moon. 

Jaebeom raises his arms high, fingers reaching into the tallest of windows, and it’s all a backdrop to his smile. 

Jackson comes crashing into him from behind, hooking half his body over his shoulder, and the shock of his laughter is a mix of every amateur artist’s sidewalk speaker, the thin buzz of each _ahjumma’s_ homemade storefront sign. 

“Come on, let’s have some fun!”

Jinyoung, beyond all belief, thinks he could in this city of living lights and aching smiles.

-

In a small road-side stall with their backs half-exposed to the entire street, Jackson steals the _soju_ right from under Jinyoung’s fingers to fill Jaebeom’s glass.

Then, as Jaebeom tips the shot back and Jinyoung watches the thick length of his exposed throat bob, Jackson bumps the bottle back under his fingers again with a _look._

“Pour one for me,” he half-demands, half-whines, propping himself back against his chair with folded arms. Even as the meat is barely hissing on the grill, the _soju_ settling fresh and cold on their lips, the light above the table gives him a distinctly drunken flush. 

Jinyoung scoffs, but he taps the bottle and fills Jackson’s glass to the brim. Jaebeom grins, propping himself up by an elbow as Jackson protests, stealing back the _soju_ for the second time to top off hyung’s drink. 

“ _Jjan_ -!” Three glasses clink, one slightly late, to the hot buzz of the light above. With condensation slipping down the stickiness of his fingers, it’s an oddly pleasant sensation. 

Jinyoung drinks, facing away from the two, but he can’t help how his eyes linger again on the ease of Jaebeom’s expression. The slight wince and gasp of pure relief from ice-cold alcohol in the summer.

Dinner is an affair of three turns. Jackson grabs for the chance to turn the meat, but Jinyoung always manages to sneak a piece onto Jaebeom’s growing plate. As Jaebeom loudly plays push-and-pull with Jackson’s chopsticks, he slips pre-made wraps into the empty space on Jinyoung’s side. 

Jinyoung chews slowly around each one, savoring the warm juice of the meat as he watches Jaebeom sigh and give in with one bite around Jackson’s overflowing portions.

It must be habit that results in the two drinking until they’re thoroughly flushed by the time the grill cools. The _soju_ bites, refreshing and rough, in the back of his throat in a way that wine and glittering champagne couldn’t. Still, Jinyoung leaves the table with his glass half-empty from only a few meager sips on the excuse of “ _bathroom."_

He asks for the bill on the way there, stops inside the closet-side sink to investigate the slightly ruffled look in his eyes, and eventually brushes it away with a piece of gum from the front desk/bar. 

“Jinyoung-,” Jaebeom immediately stands, wobbling a little with an expression that could only be called a pout, “why didn’t you wait for us?”

Jackson joins him with the same confusion, albeit slightly delayed. “Yeah, we were going to split it!” He motions with a hazy hand, but Jinyoung gets it. He’s indicating between just the two of them. 

Jaebeom gasps with abject horror. “No, you guys can’t,” he practically groans, pushing Jackson to sit down again. “ _I_ was paying.” 

Jinyoung sighs, nudging his chair in with his hip. Jaebeom and Jackson are squinting and gaping at each other with mumbled words, and Jinyoung doesn’t see how any of this matters after the fact. 

“Guys,” he tentatively wraps an arm over Jaebeom’s front, “it’s really not a big deal. Whoever wants to pay next time can pay.”

“Punishment game.” Jaebeom suddenly jerks forward, slamming a hand on the table, and running himself further into Jinyoung’s arm. 

“Titanic - whoever sinks has to drink,” he declares with a self-satisfied look, gesturing at the leftover collection of glasses and _soju_ on the table. 

This is probably not the best idea. Jackson hauls his short sleeves even further up his shoulders and sets up the shot in the glass anyway. 

In the end, Jinyoung gets out drink-free on the virtue of being pretty close to sober in the first place. The shot glass tips slightly under Jackson’s single drop, but it’s Jaebeom who sinks it with barely a wobble of the _soju_ bottle’s rim. 

“ _No_ ~,” Jaebeom melts onto the table, and somehow, Jinyoung’s goes awkwardly with him. Jaebeom drags at his arm, resting his flushed cheek there. 

Jackson cackles with his rough hyena laugh, shaking at Jaebeom’s slumped shoulder. The already full glass spills over between them, and Jackson only makes it worse as he pushes it across the table. 

“It’s your punishment game now, hyung!” 

Jinyoung was really going to stop him at the cost of drinking the collective _soju_ himself, but Jaebeom sits up with a scrunch of his nose and knocks back the entire bottle’s worth of _soju_ in one go. 

“-nyoung,” he makes the most abject sound, followed by a horrendous burp as he folds himself over Jinyoung’s arm again. This time, Jinyoung makes the conscious effort to catch him before he hits the table. 

“Woah, hyung, you’re crazy-” Jackson seems more preoccupied with the empty glass, laying across the table so he’s level and a little cross-eyed with the few drops left glistening at the bottom. “I can’t believe you drank it all.” 

“Never, never again,” Jaebeom moans, flopping back with heavy effort. He keeps himself upright with one hand dragging all the way across Jinyoung’s front, and eventually, his fingers yank on the loose fabric tucked into his trousers. The path he leaves pulses on Jinyoung’s skin, and maybe Jinyoung is a little drunk too. 

Jinyoung doesn’t understand how these two lightweights ever survived a night out before, but as they step out into the humid street again, with each one bumping into either side of him, he realizes it’s not the worst fun he’s ever had. 

-

Drunk Jaebeom is an absolute menace. Jinyoung should clarify - drunk Jaebeom is an absolute _affectionate_ menace. 

He clings, pushing Jinyoung’s forehead against his cheek, the gloss on his lips long smeared across their skin, and Jinyoung - he falters in the clammy summer heat. 

Jinyoung wants to hold him as he did before, still closes his eyes and dreams about the way Jaebeom had moved, breaking on each stilted gasp. Guilty dreams. Now, Jaebeom is pressing willingly into him with every step, every drunken giggle, and it’s more than just a broad, warm shoulder against his on idle walks — Jinyoung doesn’t like the heat that curls over the front of his mind the sweeter Jaebeom’s scent gets. 

If it’s not a Jaebeom that drenches him in affection, then it’s a Jaebeom that suddenly wants to run everywhere and do everything with Jinyoung in tow. In turn, a drunk Jackson becomes the best enabler of whatever antics hyung wants to get up to. 

First case in point - a punching machine: Jaebeom hurts his fist by rearing back, going full power on a roadside scam. It reads zero. Jinyoung gives it a stable punch to make sure the damn thing doesn’t swallow up their money, but Jackson’s wide look of amazement at his readout is unexpectedly endearing. 

Second, the open streets are lined with speakers. From seasonal summer pop to homemade mix-tracks, each corner of the city seems to be playing something different. Drunk Jaebeom will apparently move to anything, and as Jackson cheers him on - “ _wooh, go, go hyung~”_ \- 

-no one is allowed to be a passive bystander when he’s around. 

There’s a rhythm in his head that doesn’t seem to match any song, but it doesn’t matter. Pushing his arms above his head with a twist of his waist, it’s like he wants to put on a show but couldn’t care less about who was watching. 

And as Jinyoung is being pulled in with that blurry smile, maybe Jaebeom doesn’t care how other eyes are sliding down his back because he only wants Jinyoung’s on him. 

Jinyoung lets himself move, sweat slipping beneath the collar of his coat, curled hair flopping into his eyes. His feet hurt in his dress shoes, but Jackson is winding an elbow around Jaebeom’s, and Jaebeom is smiling so hard at him — Jinyoung fits his hands around Jaebeom’s waist and really holds on this time between the two of them. 

_i like parties, but not this place_

They cool down in the late hours of night and early morning on a riverbank. Distantly, bikes chime by and laughter passes just a few streets down, where the quiet vendor stalls lead into the bright city again. Jackson lays flat with his head on his hands, breathing in and out, as if asleep. 

“Look,” Jaebeom murmurs, settling onto his haunches as he points across the dark bank, “that’s the spring park in our district.”

It’s very much a dull spot in the night, but Jinyoung can imagine the two of them looking this way, in the exact opposite direction, their hands touching on that stone bench. 

“Yeah,” Jinyoung breathes back, affectionately aware of the way Jaebeom is tucked against the crook of his neck, “I remember, Jaebeom.”

“Hyung~,” Jaebeom whines, rocking in place as if to get up. “You have to call me _hyung_ , Jinyoungie.” 

“Okay, hyung,” Jinyoung acquiesces, gripping at the tip of Jaebeom’s fingers when he does really stand up. “Where are you going, hyung?”

Jaebeom sways on the incline, eyes closing with a prolonged blink before he seems to remember his answer. “Mm, s’hot.” He clenches quickly around Jinyoung’s hand and lets go. “Gonna go get us some drinks.” 

“Stay.” He pushes Jinyoung back down with a palm against his forehead. “Keep Jackson company okay?”

“Sure,” Jinyoung mutters petulantly, curling himself over the tops of his knees.

Jaebeom leaves with one last blind pat at the top of his head, which makes Jinyoung feel distinctly silly and yet he wants more, following the trailing touch with drooping eyes as he tips backwards.

He lands breathlessly on the hard bank, and that makes him open his eyes with a sudden sense of clarity. It’s Jackson with his eyes closed, fluttering, next to him, something uncomfortable and probably dirty digging into his back, and only the lightest hint of Jaebeom in the air. 

“Jackson,” he nudges the other man with his foot, “don’t fall asleep.”

“Hm, won’t.” 

“Jackson get up. Jaebeom is buying drinks for us and then we have to go.” 

Jackson groans, an aching, full-body kind of sound, and he jerks upright with a wild, glistening look in his eyes. “No, no, don’t let him pay again.”

Jinyoung really doesn’t understand why it’s so urgent. “It’s just drinks, we can pay him back.” He tentatively settles a hand on Jackson’s clammy shoulder.

Jackson shakes sloppily, his head, and then with goosebump-shivers over his entire body. Jinyoung’s hand falls away. Under the cold moonlight, the flush of city heat still sits like a dark edge beneath the cut of his cheeks. 

“No, it’s always him. Doesn’t ever let me help.” Jinyoung gets the distinct feeling that this isn’t about genial fighting over restaurant bills or drinks anymore. 

“I don’t want him to hurt anymore.” Jackson sniffles, a faraway daze glistening in his eyes, and even drunk, Jinyoung feels his heart ache in the same way. “But I think I already fucked up.”

The wind passes over the water, setting invisible boats into the night. Beyond the bank, there’s the slight echo of Jaebeom’s slurred bartering with a stubborn vendor. 

“Yeah,” Jinyoung settles back onto his palms, closing his eyes. “I did too.” 

They commiserate like that over shared pains given and taken for the few moments of cicada cries. Jackson dully huddled over his knees with a leaking nose, and Jinyoung, carefully calm as the alcohol threatens something nasty from inside his stomach. 

“I need him though.” Jinyoung pushes himself back up, ignoring the roiling pain in his forehead. He pulls Jackson over to him, and their eyes meet. 

“And I know you do too.” 

Jackson’s face crumples, and he’s so pathetic with those dark, innocent eyes and pressed, begging mouth. 

He breathes out on a slow shuddering exhale, sagging into the space between them, and Jinyoung is tired, so tired of the way it’s always raw, open wounds below the surface. The alcohol and steaming night market was a good excuse as any for uncomplicated fun, but when he yanks Jackson fully against his shoulder and pats awkwardly at his cheek it’s because he doesn't want him to cry. 

“Don’t go,” he says, the only thing on his mind. “I don’t want you to go.” 

Jackson shakes like he might cry, but he doesn’t. Jinyoung’s shoulder remains dry beneath his cheek. 

He rubs his face vigorously as if scratching an itch against Jinyoung, and the fragrance of peppercorn oil smears into his neck. 

“M’not. Would never.” He shoots Jinyoung a petulant glare from beneath his chin. “Don’t bet on it, Jinyoungie.”

Jinyoung laughs more out of surprise at the sudden endearment more than anything else. 

Later, Jaebeom asks him what he was laughing about as he taps a cold soda against a dozing Jackson’s cheek. Jinyoung tells him it’s because Jackson fell asleep with his mouth open, and Jackson is barely awake enough to protest. Jaebeom leans down to soothe over the lines on his forehead with his palm anyway. 

Jackson keeps his face tucked into Jinyoung’s neck as they sway together on the 2 am subway line. Jinyoung’s coat is draped over Jackson’s bare shoulders, and he reaches around the dozing beta to tuck the tip of his fingers just so around Jaebeom’s waist. It may not have been cold tonight, but he knew he would need the extra layer.

Jaebeom leans into Jackson, and Jackson sleeps on Jinyoung, and Jinyoung resolutely stays upright for the three of them as he hangs by the lone handrail. 

_i never lied when i cried for you (and i know you cry too)_

It’s too late for any of them to protest when they fall into bed together, all three of them. Jinyoung and Jaebeom had to practically drag Jackson up the stairs together, and even then, Jaebeom was basically dead on his feet. 

Jinyoung doesn’t care how they sleep, only that they _sleep_. On Jaebeom’s bed made for two, Jaebeom crowds against the wall with Jackson curled in the middle, and Jinyoung’s legs dangle off the side. 

Still, Jinyoung lays his arm over Jackson’s waist and lets his eyes drop closed. 

An hour or so later, it must be morning by now with the way grey light filters into the room, he wakes to the sounds of quiet crying. 

“-sorry, I’m so sorry, hyung.” Jackson’s stomach jumps erratically under the dead weight of his arm.

From across Jackson’s shoulder, Jinyoung sees the way Jaebeom’s eyes are wide open beneath the shadow of his hair, how his lips move quietly as he talks with only Jackson. Despite that, he must know that Jinyoung is awake. 

“-hurt you, can’t be the same again.” Jackson tucks his head down, hiding from the person right before him. 

“ _Sorry, I’m sorry.”_

It’s the only repeated part of the conversation that Jinyoung can catch, snatches of hoarse fires in the tender space bordering on dawn. Jinyoung remembers something so similar to this, and he wonders just where he and Jackson fucked up, two different people, at the exact same time. 

He shifts a little closer against Jackson, a little tighter as he hauls his legs back over the edge of the bed. 

On the other side, Jaebeom cradles Jackson’s cheeks and whispers something with beautiful, pained eyes. 

“I don’t care. We can’t be the same, _you can’t be Jinyoung_ , but I don’t want you to be. I won’t let you go.” 

It’s not forgiveness, but Jaebeom had no intention to ever be angry in the first place. Jackson’s sobs still spell out a tragedy even as they quiet and eventually fade into the pale morning. 

Jaebeom holds him, rubbing the tears into his skin, letting them spill salt and sticky heat down his own palms. He falls asleep, lips swollen around some half-forgotten reassurance, and his hands unconsciously lay over the crook of Jackson’s neck. 

Jinyoung lets his lips meet the bare curve of Jaebeom’s knuckles as he cradles Jackson, waiting for the sun to rise with wet eyes. 

_it’s a good day with the breeze_

Jinyoung untangles himself from the pile of Jackson and Jaebeom when he gives up on sleeping as the feeling of a breeze brushes over his lashes. The window was left open, just the tiniest crack, but it’s refreshing in the heavy scents of the room. 

He looks over the two of them now, breaths even between their parted lips, a pout and a frown as the only marker of what spilled out last night. Jinyoung’s legs hurt from where they had stuck over the edge of the bed, and he brushes a hand across the feeling of an odd imprint of the mattress in his calves. 

He walks with that numb ache cushioning his heels to the local breakfast joint Jackson had pointed out to him. A few streets down from the bakery, past the park, and right behind the immense pharmaceutical company, it’s too easy to miss. 

Apparently, the congee there is perfect for hangovers. Jackson had told him so with a knowing look. 

Jinyoung introduces himself to the only worker there at this hour, a small granny who takes his hands in her own when he bows, and he walks back with two takeout bowls at half the price. 

Jaebeom flops over his back as he sets it all out, chopsticks, lid, steam dripping over his fingers like dots of droopy sunshine. 

“You didn’t make that did you?” Jaebeom mumbles, lips scratching at Jinyoung’s nape. He doesn’t latch onto his waist or worm any further into his side - just settles there, the feeling of Jaebeom breathing, warm and soft, over his back. 

“Go wake up Jackson,” Jinyoung says by way of response, fingers tangling in Jaebeom’s smooth hair, his fragrant nape. 

“You’re so good~Jinyoungie.” Jaebeom trails away, and Jinyoung blushes at that, the way his name sounds in the rasping hum of the morning after. 

Sleep-soft, Jackson arrives, blinking away the uneven swell to his left cheek. An obvious imprint sits below his eyes, pinkening with swollen, gentle creases. Jaebeom hushes him as he herds him into his seat, and Jinyoung prods a pair of chopsticks into his fingers. 

It’s ridiculous, Jackson looks too much like a kid tucked between them, sipping at his congee. Every once in a while, he’ll glance at one of them and then go back to tiny sips like he’s burned his tongue on hot guilt. 

“Eat,” Jinyoung scolds, pinching Jaebeom’s cheek when the other man spends his time wordlessly fussing over Jackson. Just dewy stares, an occasional finger to brush away a gooey smear of rice, as his spoon is buried further beneath his own congee. 

“Ugh, I get it,” Jaebeom jerks his head away, his cheek holding for a moment like soft dough. Then, he looks at Jinyoung, a flicker of question: _what about you?_

Jinyoung tilts his head, slipping, a little lopsided propped against his wrist. He blinks, almost closing his eyes, but he’s still looking back under a sliver of sun. _Just need some rest is all._

Jackson, who is finally eating with uninhibited bites, is caught between them. There’s no way for him to understand, but the slight salt of the congee rouses the scent of tears, muffled bedding in the still morning, too tender and it’s hints of all of them, all at once. 

A fresh breeze, yet deep like the morning air, Jinyoung lets himself doze to the scent, the sight of Jaebeom soothing over Jackson’s blotchy cheeks, and Jackson leaning into him with only slight hesitation. 

_a carefree night when i’m no longer alone_

Jackson nudges himself awake, feeling like his face has sunken in and rearranged itself in the span of an accidental nap. 

Jaebeom bumps him with the shoulder he’s laying on. The empty TV flashes a still light over his face in the darkness, and Jackson feels like it’s all too surreal. 

“Wha-?” He tenses, flailing at the cocoon of cushions and sudden night.

“Shh,” Jaebeom soothes, gently but firmly pushing Jackson back down against his shoulder. Hyung always smells so full, like he’s blooming, smothered in warm blankets - Jackson remembers the same comfort, countless nights spent nuzzled in Jaebeom’s bed, nosing at his throat. 

“Stay the night Sseunie?” 

Jackson opens his mouth hoarsely, a tick in his throat. Jaebeom’s eyes glow in the stark TV light, expectant. 

“Don’t even ask— ” Jinyoung’s voice comes from somewhere behind the couch. Mumbled and thick with sleep. “Just turn the TV off already and sleep.”

“Alright, stop fussing,” Jaebeom calls back, twisting over the cushions with an automatic smile on his face. “We’re coming.” 

Jackson swallows at the ease ( _we_ , he belongs somehow in this equation now) in his tone. Jinyoung fusses again, the sound of vague grumbling under mismatched blankets. 

Maybe it’s weakness, maybe it’s because he doesn’t think he’d be able to drag himself back to his empty afternoons after being coddled in Jaebeom’s warmth for so long. When Jaebeom rises, pulling Jackson with him, Jackson trails after him, eyes closing. 

He thinks he accidentally knocks knees with Jinyoung trying to get comfortable, but Jaebeom settles against the wall, and it’s Jaebeom-Jackson-Jinyoung again, Jackson between the two of them. Jaebeom’s eyes are already puffy, and he shuts them fully as he pecks Jackson _good-night_ on his forehead. 

Hyung smooths his hair back and curls over him entirely. Jackson is soaked in lemon-grass and honey contentment. When he turns, there’s the little crease between Jinyoung’s brow that jumps as he sleeps. The curling scent of magnolia is still so sharp, but somehow, Jackson lets himself lean into it, soothed. 

Like this, he falls asleep for the first time since Jaebeom left and brought Jinyoung back with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will be honest, the angst train is till chugging. but please come along and let me know! how was the chapter for you!
> 
> hmu! [*](https://twitter.com/happycakecries)


	3. three.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's a lot of angst ! and complications ! but also feelings ! this chapter's the longest but i swear it will be worth it b/c i have no sense of pacing!

_him & me (what is he to you) _

Jackson watches closer than he has any right to, but it’s not with envy or tender heart-break. He watches and learns. 

Learns the way Jinyoung will step up behind Jaebeom, nudge him over to an empty spot by the handrails. Jaebeom follows, easy, a habit, and somehow, Jinyoung’s fingers always linger before he lets his hand fall. 

They fit into his hip, finding something intimate there beneath the loose layers hyung likes to wear, or they hold onto his shoulder, clenching down like he wants to pull Jaebeom back to him instead. Sometimes, it’s a brushing glance across the back of his neck. But only ever sometimes. 

Jaebeom-hyung leaves his neck bared, and even after Jinyoung, it stays that way. Unmarked with the lightest touch that never seems to stay too long. 

If it’s bated hesitation between Jinyoung and Jaebeom, then the only way Jackson could describe him and Jinyoung is - odd spaces.

Jaebeom hugs Jinyoung first at the door, his glasses slipping loose beneath his short hair, dislodged against Jinyoung’s shoulder. Jinyoung’s fingers hold lightly at Jaebeom’s waist. He rocks back on his heels a bit, then forward, always trying to find his balance again after seeing Jaebeom at the end of the day. 

When it’s Jackson’s turn to get swept up into a sweet embrace, Jinyoung’s eyes find his over the broad comfort of Jaebeom’s shoulder. He’s still close enough that his fingers might brush over Jaebeom’s waist, Jackson’s wrist. 

Jackson meets his gaze and wonders if he might hold him, close his trim fingers around his wrist and pull him closer. Jinyoung glances away. 

Still, odd spaces only last for the odd moment in the evening, and Jackson doesn’t hesitate when he nudges Jinyoung around the kitchen. It’s a leftovers fried rice kind of day, and Jinyoung can’t be trusted alone with any kind of cooking. 

“Cooking oil?” Jinyoung turns a fraction on the tile, then returns to his original spot, completely lost. With his hands in his neat pockets, another tan coat tucked into the crook of his arm, Jackson irrationally wants to kick him out the kitchen before he ruins his perfect hair on heavy smoke and grease.

Instead, he sighs and walks Jinyoung over to the top cabinet, with his hands framing Jinyoung’s back and his knees knocking into Jinyoung’s calves. It’s a bumbling line, and they hip check a Jaebeom on his way to the sink in the process, but Jinyoung gets the message. He lets Jackson touch him like this and goes.

“Here.” The oil is found eventually. Jaebeom joins them with defrosted peas and carrots and presses in on Jinyoung’s other side. 

“Try frying it.” Hyung’s smile is blinding in its request, and Jinyoung grumbles the entire time with his cuffed sleeves ruined and irrevocably creased up to his forearms. 

Jackson rests one arm around his waist as he prods at Jinyoung’s spatula with the other. He’s not holding him per say, more so trying to press him into staying in place, but it feels - in the sizzling pause of stale rice and fragrant smoke, intimate. All the more so when he can smell Jaebeom smeared like a perfume across the back of Jinyoung’s nape. 

Jackson’s eyes water a bit at the haze of scents. They’re standing so close after all.

Then, Jaebeom’s laughter is cut off by a faceful of hot steam, Jackson runs for a bowl of water, and Jinyoung stands there, letting his wrists burn in popping oil. That’s dinner for tonight. 

Jaebeom-hyung still pulls Jackson to him, smothering him under the guise of a hug as he tells Jackson to stay the night again. Jackson hasn’t been able to say no since he cried his heart out on _soju_ drunk tears. 

If he could remember what he said, he’s sure it would go along the lines of something like this: _i’m sorry, i love you, please let me stay._

So he can't stay no when Jaebeom lets him back into his bed and holds him as close as ever. Without any distance, any change in space even when Jackson trembles inside at the way he can wrap his arms around Jaebeom’s waist, all the way until they overlap at his spine. 

In the violent, gasping moments of night, he can’t forget the bruises on hyung’s heaving stomach, the desperate grasp of his fingers. His mouth swollen on a plea of tears. 

Jackson holds tight, always interrupting the space between Jaebeom and Jinyoung, and despite everything, when Jackson finds that odd pause, the bated breath on a shared pillow, he falls back asleep, his exhale brushing closer to Jinyoung in the process.

-

In every day to every night, Jinyoung lives with the constant awareness of Jaebeom, and how it’s all changed for him. 

Because he thinks, in any other life, this is not how it would have turned out. Reaching across the bed to feel the way Jaebeom’s sigh brushes against his knuckles. Waking him after with a hand to his ear, tucking his hair back, finally cupping his jaw as Jaebeom turns to him in the sunlight. 

It’s pure domesticity — nevermind the second body Jinyoung has to reach around. 

With Jaebeom, Jinyoung finds himself holding back on the edge of something they once knew, from the way he used to let his hands slide over the arch of Jaebeom’s back and lower behind tinted windows. 

With Jackson, he holds back from something he was never part of. Something that feels like an intrusion. 

He knows Jackson can’t see, but often enough, Jinyoung stands outside the two of them, and it’s clear what they were before Jinyoung. Despite his protests at open affection, he sees how it’s always Jaebeom pulling Jackson into him first, and Jackson faltering in his arms. 

Flinching away on old habits alone. As if it’s wrong to hold Jaebeom this closely now, even though nothing has truly happened between them - only that there’s a line drawn by Jinyoung’s name in the sand. 

He knows how much Jackson wants, so he turns away then. Jackson’s fingers clenching into Jaebeom’s back, how his eyes flicker over to Jinyoung at times like he’s lost - they’re not for Jinyoung to see. 

He realizes that feeling, so foreign it’s like prodding at a numb spot, when Jackson’s hushed chatter eventually fades beneath the re-run of a Sunday drama.

He slips away from his textbooks on the excuse of a coffee break, but the languid sight in the afternoon sun makes him pause. 

From behind, Jaebeom’s fingers dance in and out of Jackson’s hair as he sprawls there, tucked between the arm of the couch and the entirety of Jaebeom’s body. A page rustles, Jaebeom rearranges his reports with one hand, and Jinyoung hears his own sharp intake of breath. 

Jaebeom turns, and his eyes are gentle, practically melting with the sun soaking into his cheeks. Jackson dozes on, unaware of the way Jaebeom had been looking at him. 

_Coffee_? Jaebeom mouths, still so adoring and soft in the lull of the muted TV. He’s smiling at Jinyoung now with his hand cupping Jackson to his shoulder.

An achingly slow moment passes before he responds. He tips his almost-empty cup slightly - _do you want some?_

Jaebeom shakes his head gingerly, taking so much care as he turns back to Jackson with that look on his face. In every way, every unconscious press of his fingers, it’s reserved for Jackson alone. 

It’s moments like these where he watches his own odd edges intrude on Jaebeom’s life. On those sharp points, enough to cut at skin, he feels like he might fall out of place because nothing fits well enough with broken glass from shattered mirrors. 

Jaebeom turns to him again, and despite saying nothing, not moving from around Jackson, Jinyoung goes to him. 

Jaebeom resettles his papers between their thighs, and Jinyoung can’t pretend, doesn’t hesitate enough when he usually would, as he crowds into Jaebeom. It had hurt too much, to stand there alone with his grainy coffee cup, watching Jaebeom turn away from him. 

He digs his nose into the soft spot beneath Jaebeom’s jaw and breathes in the flush of omega sweetness through his mouth. It’s not scenting, not a marking bite - he can’t, _won’t_ , ever get that close again - but Jaebeom stays relaxed against him. He lets Jinyoung have it, softly, slowly, with a patient flutter of his lashes.

Something he avoids whenever Jackson is there with his bright eyes, when the train is crowded on rushed mornings, and Jinyoung would give anything to cover Jaebeom’s bare neck with his palm. He holds himself back then. 

(He should have held back long before then).

Now, Jaebeom only murmurs against his forehead as the heat of his scent spills openly into Jinyoung’s mouth. “Want to help me out with the expense reports? Don’t tell Youngjae, but I think you could do a much better job than me.” 

Jinyoung rumbles against his neck, eyes stuttering closed, and Jaebeom hums, pretending to agree with whatever his answer was. 

It’s still too tender between them, but Jaebeom lets him stay like that for a moment longer. He lets Jinyoung take something he shouldn’t, something he _needs_. 

When Jackson rouses, nuzzling back into the curve of Jaebeom’s arm with a low sound in his throat, it’s to Jinyoung and Jaebeom brushing fingers over interlacing lines of numbers. Jinyoung glances up, and somehow, meeting Jackson’s wide stare with Jaebeom still pressed up against him - and it’s not so out of place this time. 

-

“Jaebeom-ah.”

Jaebeom’s eyes blink open. Tonight, it’s him in the middle, with Jackson’s knees knocking into the wall, and almost as always, Jinyoung dangling slightly off the edge on the outside. 

“Your bed is too small for all of us.” 

Jaebeom blinks again, this time almost shaking incredulously as he raises his head from the pillow. Hurt, anger, indignation like flashes of heat, all softened slightly by lingering confusion in his sleepy eyes, hair still smothered messily around his cheeks. 

His mouth opens, closes, almost pouting when he can’t find the right words for this midnight confrontation. 

Jinyoung tangles his fingers through the side of his hair, pushing him gently to lay back down. He keeps his hand cradled on Jaebeom’s cheek, and despite everything, Jaebeom stills beneath his palm. 

Jinyoung breaths out, quiet, a pause before he makes his decision. “We should get a new one.” 

Jaebeom gapes at him, this time only with plain surprise. Then, a hush of silver laughter. He brushes close, so close, holding Jinyoung’s palm to his cheek as his smile almost touches Jinyoung’s lips. 

“You’re so good Jinyoung.” Another exhale, more breathless as it fades between their mouths. “So good. Thank you.” 

And Jinyoung hates that he waits with open eyes, parted lips. With Jaebeom already pressed up against him, Jackson a pillow away, he hates that he should _expect_ anything from this. 

It’s for Jackson, it’s for all of them, but Jinyoung can’t help it. Jaebeom looks at him sometimes with something vulnerable slipping free, and Jinyoung thinks Jaebeom might touch him again, might _want_ Jinyoung as he did before. 

He tries to forget that terrible impulse again as Jaebeom whispers breathless plans to him. Just the two of them, awake beneath faraway city lights, and Jaebeom close enough to kiss. Jinyoung tells himself it’s all he needs, pretends that Jaebeom’s mouth brushing past the corner of his as he crushes Jinyoung to his chest is simply what it is. 

Affection, light and sweet. He can fall asleep to that with Jaebeom wrapped around him. 

Despite their agreement, it’s hard to find a day off with just the two of them to sneak a whole new bed up seven flights of stairs. In their tentative coexistence of three, Jackson practically lives at Jaebeom’s after work. 

When they do manage a distraction out of sheer timing alone (see: a visit from Jackson’s landlord to see if he’s still alive), there’s the problem of the actual bed. 

“Why are you wearing a coat in this kind of weather -” Jaebeom grunts from the other side of the mattress, giving it a sudden push. “Just, take it off!” 

“Can you— ,” Jinyoung has to catch his footing, stumbling backwards up the stairs. “Give me a warning next time you decide to go up on your own.”

Jaebeom’s sigh is loud and exasperated behind the wide, bouncy wall between them. 

They get the mattress settled eventually, along with a bigger bed frame. Jaebeom collapses for the rest of the afternoon, unmoving on the couch with his arm thrown over his eyes. 

“Bad back,” is all he says with a grimace when Jinyoung tentatively asks. 

Jinyoung tries to do what he can, tugging an uncooperative Jaebeom into laying flat on his front as he places a hot water pack carefully in the curve of his lower back. 

“What else can I do?” Jinyoung crouches down, brushing Jaebeom’s bangs out of his clenched eyes. 

There’s still that tight white line of pain between his brows, but Jaebeom only hesitates before pressing his lips together with some kind of conviction. Jinyoung isn’t convinced, but he can’t do anything more when all he wants is for Jaebeom to lay on his lap and let him knead his palms into the soft curves of his back through his white t-shirt. 

Jaebeom doesn’t let him touch him. “Go catch up on your studying,” he scolds instead, flapping one limp hand at Jinyoung.

“After Ibuprofen,” Jinyoung maintains, already searching for the bottle by Jaebeom’s newly assembled bed. 

Jaebeom does assent to two pills, opening his mouth directly for Jinyoung’s hand and then obediently lifting his head as Jinyoung gently tips a glass of water against his lips. 

It’s too hot to study, but Jinyoung does settle himself next to Jaebeom on the couch. Not with his thighs cushioning his head, but he does lift Jaebeom’s feet onto his lap and drape his coat over his legs. Jaebeom doesn’t protest with his face buried in a pillow, so Jinyoung gently lays his textbook on his ankles and falls asleep to the same page on the cost factors of production. 

That’s how Jackson finds them, blinking awake hurriedly to his questioning look. 

Jackson practically squeals when they herd him, one on each side, into the bedroom. 

“Hyung - Jinyoungie, oh my God,” he bounces over to the mattress, now covering more than half of Jaebeom’s tiny bedroom. He flops down with a sigh. “I can finally sleep well tonight~”

“Good,” Jinyoung states as Jaebeom takes slight offense on behalf of his old bed. He nudges Jackson’s socked foot off the new, clean mattress with a swat. “Because I’m tired of taking the outside and having to wake up with sore knees.” 

Jackson barely budges, wriggling like a pup into the smell of store-fresh foam mixed with the familiar weight of their scents. “Well, I want the wall anyway.” 

“Alright, alright, kids,” Jaebeom sighs, “I can take the outside this time.” He winces again as he tries to pull the sheets into order, having to bend slightly. 

Jackson and Jinyoung immediately jump to protest. 

“No way hyung, I was just joking, it’s more comfortable on the open side anyway-”

“Jaebeom, you’re sleeping in the middle-”

Jaebeom raises his hands, a little stunned, more than flustered. “Guys-,” he tugs at the edge of a stubborn sheet, “you know the bed is bigger now right?” 

Jackson and Jinyoung don’t know what to say after that. Still, Jaebeom takes the wall anyway, leaving Jinyoung and Jackson to face each other with significantly more space between them. 

The lights are off, and Jaebeom always falls asleep first, easily collapsing with a single exhale, but Jinyoung can’t help but note the way his arm can stretch out flat and barely brush against Jackson’s shoulder. 

Jackson must be thinking the same thing. He grins playfully, whispering just a touch too loud. “There’s so much space now, huh?” 

Jinyoung hums, pretending to close his eyes. “If you miss it so much, you can always come closer.” 

Jackson only makes that audible ~ _hehe_ , and Jinyoung is surprised as Jackson actually scooches into the open curve of his body. 

It’s not an embrace, nothing close to even the most casual ways Jaebeom curls around either of them, but Jackson rests his arm lightly on his waist, and Jinyoung blinks his eyes open. 

Jackson smiles up at him with his lips pressed together, an endearing look. “Thanks Jinyoungie.” 

Jinyoung doesn’t ask him what for, because they’ve never talked about it, the definition of Jackson back-hugging him when they’re forced to cook or when Jinyoung unconsciously held him twice through his tears. 

How do you even approach such a thing with someone who loves the same person as you, someone who has loved him for just as long - if not longer and more painfully so?

But Jinyoung lets his arm rest between them, where it finally feels right in the closest sense of the word. Jackson’s smile trembles at the edges, so Jinyoung shuts his eyes again, and lets Jackson press as close as he needs. 

_me & you (but what am i to you) _

The days leading up to Jaebeom’s heat are stifled with sentences started with frustrated half-breaths and later, cut off entirely on oppressive silence and pure denial. 

Jaebeom spends most of his time in the bedroom, a ball of pure agitation, and Jinyoung stays frozen in the living room when he can, fingers locked clinically around his thighs. He gazes off into nothing, determined to keep his mind blank of any whispered heat-hazes. 

Between them, Jackson has no idea what to expect. 

“Jackson,” Jaebeom looks up from the bed, twisting an array of blankets between his hands. It looks painful with the way his thick knuckles are fading into white bone around worn cotton. 

He looks at Jackson and even before his heat has started, Jackson can see he’s hurting. 

“Can you take the week off?”

When Jaebeom-hyung asks him like that, pressing the words through clenched teeth as if this is the last thing he wants, Jackson remembers how it’s always been. Jaebeom crying out yet pushing away from any kind of touch. 

Jackson knows how much he hates it, the desperation that comes with his nature. When Jackson had tried to soothe his hand over hyung’s tensed neck, lay his scent into the delicate skin there, it was always met with the incompatibility of his touch. But now - 

“What about Jinyoung?” He hesitates, but for once, he’s not reading it wrong, is he? It’s plain and simple - Jaebeom kisses Jinyoung sometimes, his mouth tucked sweetly into the corner of Jinyoung’s, and Jinyoung leaves his arm around Jaebeom’s waist like that’s its natural place in public. 

“Isn’t— isn’t he an alpha?” 

Jaebeom pauses in his frantic fussing. His hands settle in his lap, so pale and small, clenched around something that isn’t quite there. The silent look he directs through the open door is purely brittle. 

“Even so, Jackson,” and Jackson doesn’t know why he’s speaking so slowly, mincing every word as if he was talking to a child again, “that doesn’t mean he has to help me.”

He ducks down, his voice a bare murmur, and perhaps it’s Jaebeom trying to convince himself. “Doesn’t mean he has to _want_ me.” 

Jackson is completely stricken. “How could you say that hyung-,” he drops to the bed, trying to hold Jaebeom’s limp hands in his own. They don’t exactly fit, but covered by Jackson’s, they look less lonely. 

“Jackson-” Jaebeom suddenly looks up, fiercely holding back a wet glare. 

“Even if I don’t know what’s between the two of you, there’s no way that’s true-”

“Jackson.” 

Jackson can’t push any further. Jaebeom grips onto his hands like he might break, as he almost did before. The heavy perfume of lemon-grass fills his throat, wet, cloying like fresh tears. 

“Just stay with me for the week,” Jaebeom sighs, a long and exhaustive sound, “please.” 

Jackson can’t make the same mistake again. But even as he agrees, trying to calm the tremors in hyung’s thin wrists, he thinks he might be fucking something else up entirely. 

A mistake for all them - Jaebeom caged in his shaking body and strewn blankets, Jinyoung purposefully closing his eyes in the slow afternoon, and Jackson letting himself get between the two of them. 

He wonders, holding a softly shaking Jaebeom in his hands, just how much he ever really knew about hyung. Jaebeom-hyung who turns his back, strong and stubborn, to Jackson, refusing any kind of relief. Jaebeom who would never ask for Jackson to touch him, to even look at him in such a state, to overstep the bounds of their relationship, when Jackson already did. Jaebeom, who looks at Jinyoung like he would break for him. 

That if Jinyoung asked, he would do so willingly, tears, slick, bites, and all. 

(“Jinyoung - my heat is coming soon.”

Frozen in passing, with one elbow caught in Jaebeom’s hand, a late-night coffee refill in the other, Jinyoung could not think of a worse moment to hear those words out loud. 

“I-”

He honestly has no idea what to say. What can he say when it’s only been tears, teeth, and the reflection of his face in cold glass? He’d forgotten - or really, a voice like his own tells him in a darker shade, he’d _wanted_ to forget. 

If Jaebeom had let him fold his arm around the empty space at his waist, leaned into Jinyoung’s hand on his cheek in the most vulnerable of waking hours, then it was too easy. 

Jaebom had always turned to him, too easy, with that smile that made his eyes disappear, and Jinyoung had forgotten. 

Now, it’s still Jaebeom looking at him with soft, tentative eyes, coming to him like he trusts him. 

Jinyoung _can’t._

He breaks out of Jaebeom’s gentle grip on a frantic breath. His coffee is spilling out of the cup, but his throat is burning even worse, and Jaebeom is only reaching out for him again-

“Jaebeom, I—I can’t.” 

The sudden spike in Jaebeom’s scent is overwhelming. It’s like actual sugar, the grit of it caught on his tongue, making his mouth purse around the taste, the way it curls with the sweetest tang of lemon-cake. 

There’s the image, a memory, of him licking at a pale throat covered with a single black collar. When he draws back, it’s to the raw mark of his teeth with blood soaking through skin and saliva. 

Jaebeom’s face is crumpling, but Jinyoung is terrified of waking again to another mottled bite, of purple bleeding into a starburst bruise of broken veins. This time, it would be to Jaebeom gasping in numb panic, shaking beneath him without the pretense of a blindfold or his own rut, and then - 

He repeats himself, and it feels like he’s bleeding, with the way his words cut into his mouth. “Jaebeom, _I’m not going to hurt you again_.” 

“Jinyoung,” Jaebeom’s hand slides over his wrist, holding him so tentatively like he might jerk free like some wild animal. And yet, he touches him intimately, a thumb paused on his naked pulse. 

“Jinyoung, you won’t, I —,” Jaebeom starts again, and he’s trying to hold on too, to the brittle, fragile thing between them. 

“I need you. Please.” Jaebeom pleads with his own weaknesses out in the open, if only to make Jinyoung understand the slight tremble of his breath, the guilty honesty in his eyes. 

Jinyoung stumbles. If he’s making a mistake now, letting Jaebeom stand in the shadow of the kitchen with heartbreak flickering in his eyes, then he’ll fix it somehow. Even if Jaebeom can’t forgive him, if he shies away at every one of Jinyoung’s meaningless touches after this, it’s worth it now.

“I can’t - I’m sorry.” Jaebeom stares at him, and the light from the low lamp makes something smear wetly in his gaze. 

But Jinyoung - he can’t have hurt him any more than he already has. 

He shakes his head and stumbles, one foot then another, heel to toe, until it’s just his head falling back against a sharp corner, the coffee gone cold on his sleeve. 

Still, he puts in an advance request for a sick week. When prompted with the reason, he chooses “partner’s heat leave”).

-

Jackson scooches up to Jaebeom as tentatively as the first time he had held his hyung through his “bad fever” and every month or so after. 

“Are you comfy?” Jackson asks, more out of an idle feeling of stuffiness rather than serious worry. After all, hyung is ever barely lucid enough to actually respond in full. 

A harsh sound that comes from the cocoon of blankets tells him all he needs to know. 

Jackson wraps his arms as best as he can over the entire lump, calms his breathing along with the steady wave of his scent, and noses into hyung’s hair. Jaebeom’s heat is a heavy saturation of warm sugar over his lips, his head, his skin, and it never fails to make him docile and content enough to just doze. 

Jaebeom wriggles in his arms, and Jackson murmurs sleepily into his burning nape. His own scent washes over them in a downpour of peppercorn oil, a reminder of familiar affection through the agitation. 

Eventually, Jaebeom calms, and Jackson can almost believe that it’s going to be as always -

Of Jackson soothing him like this through feverish nights, of Jaebeom putting up a fuss, jerking at his touch, and eventually stilling as Jackson rubs the strongest parts of their scents together into the soft underside of his jaw. 

Jaebeom goes stock still three days into his heat. No shifting kicks, turning in place, or even the choked-off gasps that hold the hint of a moan. 

“Hyung?” Jackson tentatively rises up onto one elbow.

“Jackson,” Jaebeom’s voice comes out, completely tightened in pain. “I need you to get a bucket.” 

He finally moves, and the blankets fall loosely around him without Jackson to hold them in place. He looks up at him with sweat dripping down deliriously pink cheeks. 

“ — I’m going to throw up.”

-

Jinyoung can’t help it. He’s paced a mile in front of the bedroom door ever since the day the siren call of fresh slick had saturated the air. 

If Jackson – if _Jaebeom_ – needs something, then he has to be close enough to hear them. Otherwise, if he’s forced to sit down for longer than a brief nap, he might tear into the couch by the end of the week. 

The door opens, and before Jinyoung even registers it, Jackson slams into him, catches him a second later, and immediately pushes him to the side with a look of pure panic. 

“What’s happening – is he okay-?” 

Jackson is rummaging through the drying rack with a messy kind of urgency. Coming upon the lack of whatever it is he’s looking for, he yanks open the dishwasher with a curse under his breath. 

“Jackson, hey-,” Jinyoung’s hand on his shoulder only seems to divert the entirety of the panic upon him.

“We don’t own a bucket do we – no, there’s no way hyung could make it to the toilet bowl, wait – is there a bowl big enough-“

Jinyoung automatically finds the clear bowl he’s used for washing vegetables the many times Jaebeom and Jackson had teased (see: shamed) him into cooking. Jackson takes it with a wary look too quick for Jinyoung to read as he rushes back the way he came.

Jinyoung watches as Jaebeom buries his face into the bowl and heaves up nothing but clear stomach acid and water. He watches as Jaebeom shakes and shakes with Jackson’s hands holding him back by his shoulders, watches as Jaebeom barely breathes between dry, gagging retches. 

“Jinyoung - Jinyoung,” he finally stops with a shuddering gasp, his face wet and tacky with spit and tears, and he’s looking up at Jinyoung, _begging_ for him. 

“I need you, please – _please_ just touch me.” 

Jackson looks at him with something close to surrender, and Jinyoung, he gives when Jaebeom’s sob breaks on the sound of his name. 

-

“Don’t take it off until it’s over,” Jinyoung talks clumsily around the leather belt in his mouth. The buckle clinks, an uncomfortably cold weight at the back of his head. A reminder of the promise he made. 

(“I’ll, I’ll help,” he cups Jaebeom’s smudged cheeks as carefully, as lightly as possible. “But I can’t – I won’t, inside, I won’t hurt you again-“

“I don’t care,” Jaebeom lashes out blindly, yet reaches for him anyway. Jackson tentatively holds him back by the waist. 

“Just touch me, I don’t care what happens -- I need you to _touch me_.” 

He stills when Jinyoung fits his palm to his cheek and keeps it there, aching in the entirety of where they’re finally connected, skin to skin. Over his shoulder, Jinyoung meets Jackson’s eyes and makes a silent plea for help). 

“What if you try to take it off?” Jackson asks, testing the give of the knot on Jinyoung’s soft hair. Leather on metal over warm skin, it can’t feel good. 

“Well, obviously don’t let me.” The eye-roll is apparent even from behind his head. 

Jackson swallows, tightening the dead-knot one last time as Jinyoung slides the makeshift bit between his teeth. 

Jinyoung is completely silent when Jaebeom noses tenderly into his neck. He has to be, to keep his mouth shut around the leather, to feel the imitation of his teeth lodged in a bite. He cringes at the spit already soaking his chin, and it’s not just because of the way the belt stretches his cheeks too wide. 

Jaebeom lets out a little sound, mostly empty breath with a trailing high whine. Jinyoung muffles his responding groan into the damp texture filling his mouth. 

When he slips his fingers into Jaebeom, Jackson throws a blanket over their stomachs as a last-ditch attempt at decency. He watches Jinyoung with a ruddy blush and something like hooded awareness in his eyes. Still, he doesn’t look away from the trembling bit in Jinyoung’s mouth. 

Jaebeom is swollen and dripping for just two fingers. It’s been so long, Jinyoung forgets how obscene it is to have Jaebeom’s slick coating him from wrist to elbow. He can smell it too, as intimate as warm dew on his upper lip. 

By the time he has four fingers in, there are constant bursts of fresh slick across his palm. His hand is so wet, every stretch, every slide, goes farther than it should. 

Jaebeom gasps against his shoulder, pushing against his knuckles when they slip out of him, throwing his head back with a silent scream when they shove back in.

The first time he comes it’s almost violent. Jackson pushes him down by the indent of his hip through the blanket, and Jinyoung’s hand is crushed between the aching shock of his thighs. 

Jaebeom breathes as if working through tears. He stays huddled against Jinyoung’s chest, his hand clenching again and again with half-twitches around his shirt. 

Then, it starts again. And again. And again.

It’s cruel, but Jaebeom actually cries out when Jinyoung spears two fingers directly into his prostate. Still, he comes immediately, his cock jerking messily all over Jinyoung’s clothed hip. 

At this point, there’s nowhere that isn’t soaked or at least stained with slick, come, or sweat. Against Jinyoung’s neck are the smeared trails of Jaebeom’s tears. 

Between noon lulls of Jackson mopping a towel over Jaebeom’s face, forcing juice box straws between both of their lips, Jinyoung deliriously lets himself think that this might be over soon. That this is all Jaebeom needs – Jinyoung’s scent smothered against his cheek and Jinyoung’s fingers in his wet hole. 

But in the end, it’s never that easy between them. 

Something is wrong when Jaebeom starts to come dry, with only tiny spurts of clear fluid that leak weakly from his cock when he locks around Jinyoung’s fingers. 

There’s no way he’s simply gone dry. The impossible amounts of slick still gushing out of him are a testament to that. Omegas in heat don’t just “run out.” 

He finally realizes it’s just not enough when Jaebeom clutches at his abdomen in audible pain. 

“Hurts, hurts,” he gasps with wet, open eyes, and the bare curve of his stomach twitches erratically beneath his fingers. “Jinyoung – _it hurts so much_.” 

He scrabbles over Jinyoung, pushing down against his lap, and Jinyoung hates that he’s been hard this whole time, that his cock jumps even more at the way Jaebeom immediately soaks into the front of his trousers.

He can’t do this, but Jaebeom is keening on top of him with open sobs, and his world is narrowing to the hard leather in his mouth and Jaebeom rubbing his swollen hole over the hard line of his growing knot -

It might be his fingers on his zipper or Jaebeom’s, but Jackson stops them both. 

“Here,” he shoves a very oddly proportioned toy into Jinyoung’s locked fingers. He looks away immediately – and oh, it’s a fake knot. 

“Just, just help him,” Jackson mumbles curling into himself, peeking above his knees with only the slightest hint of his eyes. 

For the first time, Jinyoung fits his hand to the crook of Jaebeom’s hip. It sears beneath his palm. 

Jaebeom's desperate moans seem to rattle inside his own mouth, burning friction against the leather, wet skin and spit. Jinyoung pushes the entire toy in, all the way, until Jaebeom is stretched wide open from tip to base, around the entire swell of the knot. Jaebeom chokes on a punched-out breath, his tongue caught between his teeth, biting down in pain, in white-hot ecstasy. 

It hurts, still hurts in the way that Jaebeom’s stomach jumps as he forces himself down on the fake knot. It’s as if that’s all he needed, even as every thrust bears his weight down onto Jinyoung’s cock, smears the scent of Jaebeom’s slick into his come. 

It hurts, that even reduced to all they are, Jinyoung still wants Jaebeom above all else. 

So perhaps he is truly cruel when he drives the knot into Jaebeom’s gaping hole by the base one last time. He twists his wrist, pushing into the deep heat where his own cock had been, and it’s painful how much further the toy goes. 

Jaebeom writhes like he might be dying. He sobs, empty and torn, a sound suspiciously close to Jinyoung’s name. 

It’s the last time, and Jackson’s broken exhale says everything between them. 

…

The leather belt was almost bitten through. Jinyoung holds it up and marvels at it in the only way he can, suitably horrified, at the plush imprints of his own teeth in the thick loops. The torn edges of his mouth sting in response. 

Jackson is still letting out these exhaustive sighs next to him. 

Jinyoung glances over at him, and turning his head makes his lower jaw ache intensely. Somehow, even closing his mouth until his teeth click feels foreign in the most distant way. 

They sit together on the couch with half-a-cushion’s distance between them. Jaebeom is passed out on the only clean part of the bed left – the edge. 

They should clean him up, wipe away the aches and dried come until he’s soft and tucked into the safety of unused blankets. 

Jackson can’t quite look at either of them yet. Jinyoung can’t face his own palms. They’re still plastered, all the way down to his forearms, where his button-up remains, rolled-up and ruined. In the dazed morning light, his skin seems to stretch with a lurid glint when he moves. 

He goes to prop his cheek against his knuckles, and Jackson makes a sharp inhale.

“You should – you should wash.” He hates himself for saying that immediately after. 

“Ah,” Jinyoung drops his hand. He lets it fall to his lap, but he doesn’t know how to hold himself exactly - gingerly, his fingers curl in the air. 

“You go first.” 

Jackson blinks clinically. He takes the excuse for what it is and strides away shakily. Jaebeom still needs to be properly taken care of, after all.

Jinyoung sits alone on the couch, his palms laid carefully over his legs. Jaebeom’s heat is safely over with, and he had kept the promise to himself. There was no bite, not even the slightest bruised lip, but he feels empty. 

Jaebeom might have needed him, but not like this. 

_can’t you see me?_

Jackson joins him after he peeks out past the door with only a tilted look of sleepy confusion. Then, hesitant consideration. 

Jinyoung, caught with the flickers of a lit cigarette, decidedly presses the other end back between his lips. 

On the tiny alcove outside of Jaebeom’s apartment, where, if you lean out far enough, you can catch the moon in your palm, Jackson watches him breathe out dirty smoke on a smooth drag. 

“...You smoke?” 

“No,” Jinyoung bites down on the damp tobacco, tasting ash. He holds it in for a moment, before coughing out a roiling grey cloud. “Just something I picked up from the university kids.”

The look Jackson gives him is one of pure disappointment. 

Jinyoung laughs in his face, and Jackson hates the empty flutter of bliss in his eyes. 

He takes another drag, this time letting the smoke filter through his nose. A few wisps curl from his mouth, but it only serves to make him look like some high-end socialite, advertising the looser pleasures of life. Though, Jackson supposes that’s what he used to be. 

“Maybe I’m doing this to fuck myself over,” Jinyoung noncommittally answers Jackson’s not-question. 

“It’s good - here with you, Jaebeom. But,” Something gives way in the tight line of his shoulders, and Jinyoung is just another kid, playing at the lit cigarette in his fingers until he gets burnt.

He laughs as the glowing embers go out. “It’s like I’m purposefully ruining everything.”

Pause. Jinyoung fidgets with the numbness at his fingertips as Jackson feels his own guilt rise.

In the end, Jackson blurts out, “I hurt hyung too. I made him show me - everything that happened to him. How he let them use him.” He can’t stand the look on Jinyoung’s face, like some kind of self-centered deprecation. Like he’s the only one confused by his own pain. 

Intimacy on faded cigarette smoke. Is this what they’ve come to now, instead of turning away from one another in the stilted space of the bed?

Jinyoung supposes he should confess as well, no matter how empty it is. “I was the one who did those things to him.” 

Jackson doesn’t hate him now, doesn’t think he ever has, but the truth of it does make something brash swell in his throat as he pushes at Jinyoung’s shoulder a little too hard. “This isn’t a competition Park.”

They both lean away from each other, needing a breath of space. But it’s true, Jinyoung would take the prize in a heartbeat. 

Jackson doesn't know what to say. So, instead he goes along with Jaebeom, content on sunny days, shared _kimbap_ and iced coffee. Jaebeom on nights soaked with hot tears, still holding him with shaking arms, the aching curve of his back close enough for Jackson to latch onto, like hyung might fall apart as well. 

It’s how Jaebeom always is. “He would forgive, you know.” 

“I know,” Jinyoung breathes out, an impression of smoke, empty afterward. “I know and that’s what makes it so wrong.” 

There is no easy answer, but somehow, forgiveness always comes first. 

“I just wish he’d be angry for once.” He laughs, brittle, and so angry with himself. But maybe that’s only a convenient lie. 

The flare of Jaebeom’s eyes in the still night makes both of them jump. 

“I’m so tired of doing this, why are you both outside–,” he murmurs lowly, words almost slurring as he tries to reprimand them through the haze in his mouth. He strides up to Jackson first with a pointed look, and by habit, Jackson goes to him with an unhappy pout. 

Then, he sees the cigarette, dead in Jinyoung’s fingers. 

When he snatches it away, the brush of friction between them feels like a slap. 

Jaebeom stares at it, blinking incredulously, chest heaving, and Jinyoung turns his cheek, almost stinging from Jaebeom’s touch.

Jaebeom shakes his head harshly. He fixes Jinyoung with the same look, severe and unmoving. “Don’t do this, Jinyoung. Come back to bed.” 

_Jinyoung, I promise. I’ll get you out. I’ll come back to you. Jinyoung, I need you._

_Jinyoung, don’t do this._

Jaebeom’s words that never seem to falter, his promises play in his ears. Jaebeom, the one thing he’s been promised in life, and the sudden heartburn of it makes Jinyoung lash out first. 

“Why-” Jinyoung scoffs, and it’s smoke searing through his throat again, the bare pleading hint of moonlight in Jaebeom’s eyes when he looks at him. “Who are you to tell me what to do anyway?”

Jaebeom jaw tightens with a jumping nerve as he grips Jackson behind him. “Jinyoung, I’m your _hyung_.”

Of course, that’s it, that’s all he says. Jinyoung reels at the word, wanting to laugh at it until it’s all just burning smoke and the empty meaning that Jaebeom seems to cling to so much. 

It’s suddenly too raw in the space of the crushed cigarette and Jaebeom and Jackson, a step away from him. 

“You’re right. I’m sure that’s the only thing you want to be. And it’s certainly all we think of you.” Jackson is suitably confused and then, immediately winces when Jinyoung’s stare finds him behind Jaebeom’s shoulder. 

Jaebeom’s lips tremble, and it’s that same look. Even when he cries, he’s still reaching for Jinyoung, despite Jinyoung being the reason for all of his worst pains. 

Maybe, this time, that terrible part of him whispers on the breath of a dry brushfire, this time, Jaebeom is really going to leave him behind now. Leave him so he can live with less heartbreak. 

Instead, Jaebeom scowls furiously through the blur in his eyes and yanks him back inside by the wrist. Jinyoung, with Jackson stumbling in tow, simply gets a grimace that says _what did you expect_?

Jackson takes the spot in the middle as neither of them turn to face the other. The night passes by on empty fumes, and in the morning, Jackson presses Jaebeom into a quick hug as he tells hyung not to wait for him after work today. 

The smile he sends Jinyoung is tight and barely holds together the space of the two of them.

_even the pause in your breath—i want it all_

Nights without a third person are practically stifling. Jinyoung can’t blame Jackson though. He would rather escape to his own empty apartment, if he had such an option.

As it is, he feels an obligation to stay put in the mess he’s made, right next to a coldly fuming Jaebeom.

On opposite ends of the couch, stilted afternoons pass by. When Jaebeom inevitably falls into a doze, lolling over the stiff cushions with the soft pink of his open mouth in the dim light, Jinyoung can’t be the one to re-adjust his glasses and wake him in the process. 

Jinyoung always wakes slightly at odd hours of the night. Against his shoulders, he can feel Jaebeom shift in return, tucked fully into him. He never seems to sleep well after that, too aware of the way their backs brush. 

Even in his sleep, Jaebeom reaches for him, and Jinyoung muffles a guilty breath into the blankets.

In his suffocating, tentative-ness, Jaebeom turns to him first. 

“Don’t say you’re sorry again,” he says with an almost-frown. As it is, he only looks more disappointed when Jinyoung presses his lips closed. 

Jinyoung breathes out, a long, shuddering pause. Jaebeom is right there again, his eyes almost blinking shut in the glittering dark, but he’s awake. Awake and looking only at Jinyoung.

“What else can I say?” Jinyoung wants to be honest without his sharp edges, but even a simple word like sorry seems to make the curve of Jaebeom’s soft mouth drop. 

_What else is there to say,_ he wonders, letting himself finally smooth a thumb over the crease of Jaebeom’s cheek. 

“Stop it -” Jaebeom bats his hand away only to grab it, holding it achingly tight between them. 

He’s trying to be so strong, but there’s already a bit of tragic fury in his swollen eyes. “You don’t have to keep blaming yourself. You didn’t ruin me - or whatever nonsense it is you keep thinking about.” 

Every shaking breath is like a burst of fresh heartache. Jinyoung can almost taste it, how sour-sweet it would be, just like the scent in the softest part of Jaebeom’s jaw. He would hold him like glass if Jaebeom would let him. 

As it is, Jaebeom crushes his fingers tighter between his. “I told you before - you still don’t know me. Stop assuming what I want.” 

“I don’t, I don’t know-” Jinyoung repeats, and this time, Jaebeom lets him draw close, lace his fingers around his jaw as he begs. Both of them breathing against one another, desperate. 

“I don’t know what to do, but you shouldn’t have to forgive me-”

Jaebeom clenches his eyes shut and folds Jinyoung’s grasping fingers against his face like he wants Jinyoung to stay like that, forever. “Shut up, you’re so - God, don’t touch me if you think I’m just going to break.” 

“I’m not going to forgive you.” Jaebeom’s eyes say he’s willing to give _everything_. It’s supposed to be an unyielding compromise. A give-and-take, and yet, in the end, it’s more pure sacrifice than anything else.

“You can’t bite me.” 

He sounds like he’s losing a part of himself when he says it, and he’s sure yet shaking – but Jinyoung believes it. There’s already the glossy scar in the shape of his mouth peeking out from Jaebeom’s shoulder.

It’s a promise in the way that Jinyoung will never be able to settle his palm over his claim on Jaebeom’s nape on cramped bus rides, reassure him through instinct alone, because Jaebeom will know him - _his_ alpha, his mark, and his scent imprinted into his skin.

It’s the way the most natural thing between them will be left empty and numb. Because Jaebeom needs it to be so. 

And Jinyoung – despite the smoke in his lungs, his teeth catching on the tender side of his cheek – he’s willing to smother whatever hope he had in its deafening entirety just to stay. 

Jinyoung doesn’t realize his eyes are leaking, hot and wet and stinging, until he chokes on the strange sounds coming from his own chest. Jaebeom wraps around him, smothering him in an unbearably warm embrace. 

He grabs onto Jaebeom in return. Shaking fingers clawing at his back, where Jinyoung can feel the bare curves of his shoulder blades through a thin t-shirt. 

“You’re such a softie,” Jaebeom murmurs into his hair with something that makes Jinyoung bury closer, aching at his tone. 

“ _Maybe I want it to hurt,_ ” he whispers, as soft as trembling as a confession for the deaf. “Maybe you can hurt me sometimes, and I would still want it - you, and everything that comes with it.” 

“I’m not going to do it on purpose,” Jinyoung sobs around an ugly snot bubble, butting his head against Jaebeom’s chin in fervent protest.

“Even if you do, I won’t-,“ Jaebeom’s voice catches thickly, “I can’t hate you for it, ever.”

Jinyoung latches around him even tighter. His fingers must be bruising, they must hurt in the gentle curves of Jaebeom’s back, but if it hurts, then somehow, it’s better than easy forgiveness. Jaebeom strokes his fingers through his hair, lets Jinyoung’s tears drench through to his skin, but it’s more than anything Jinyoung could have asked for.

…

Later, Jinyoung finds his nerve on tacky, snot-dried cheeks, still habitually rubbing over the warm curves of Jaebeom’s chest.

“-k you?”

Jaebeom’s fingers pause in the scruffy hairs at his nape as he hums sleepily, sweetly doused in the damp affection of a post-tears kind of contentment. In the moment, everything is erring on the side of too tender, and it feels like this is right.

“Hm?”

“Does that mean you’ll let me fuck you now?”

Jaebeom crushes him into his chest with locked elbows. “Idiot,” and despite that, Jinyoung can feel laughter swell over beneath his cheek, “I would’ve let you fuck me through my heat if you had just decided to stop being stubborn.”

Jinyoung wriggles, intimately aware of his position between Jaebeom’s legs right now. A soft heat pulses against his stomach, followed by the sweeter hint of lemon-grass.

Jaebeom snorts again. “Not now _now_. Go to sleep.” He clenches his thighs tighter around Jinyoung’s waist.

Jinyoung whines about Jackson, Jaebeom smartly tells him that’s up to Jackson’s discretion, and it’s nothing but warmth in the way that Jinyoung presses into sleep, Jaebeom tucked securely around him.

_in retrospect (1), on days like these_

Jackson thinks they’re not subtle - at all. 

It’s sweet, the saccharine looks, the hand-holding, the absolute shamelessness when Jinyoung turns into Jaebeom’s kisses, opening up for him, farther, deeper. 

Maybe he’s had to loudly interject himself a few times when a hand strayed too low, but - Jinyoung, we’re in public after all! 

He doesn’t mind, really. Hyung looks happy and Jinyoung stops sulking on his own, so Jackson feels the strange spot in his chest pulse and eventually even out whenever the two of them are side-by-side, staring at one another in the way that they do. 

Sleeping and the shared bed is another matter entirely. 

(“Let me eat you out.” Jinyoung whispers, excitedly rolling himself into the space of Jaebeom’s thighs the moment Jackson’s back relaxes into its deep rise-and-fall. 

Jaebeom hides his face entirely behind his palms, shaking silently, adamantly. “ _Jackson_ ,” he hisses. Still, the hot flush spreading down his neck says he’s not going to sleep anytime soon. 

“Asleep.” Jinyoung kisses the bent of his wrists, and when Jaebeom’s thighs eventually part, so soft, so sweet for him, he pecks him again over his twitching cheeks. 

“Okay - promise to be quick.” 

He’s never done this before - and it shows. Jaebeom’s dick slaps into his cheek, and he has to close his eyes hastily more than once to avoid getting speared with pre-come. 

But Jaebeom’s slick hole pulses like crazy around his tongue and he can taste him like strawberry cough syrup, it’s so cloying and sweet. Jinyoung lets Jaebeom’s balls drag across his face as he licks into him, smearing spit, come, and slick until it’s all leaking down his throat, his chin. 

Jaebeom smothers a scream into his pillow, and even though he gets a few shuddering kicks to his back, Jinyoung mops a hand across his mouth, sloppy and satisfied). 

Jackson is scrolling through his phone with pure laxness, right up until the moment Jaebeom steps out to grab breakfast.

He sits up, looking at Jinyoung with something akin to deliberate pre-preparation. 

“You should know, I was very much _not_ asleep.” 

Jinyoung leans faintly against one hand, distantly remembering the sounds of Jaebeom’s insides giving way, obscenely, around his tongue – and maybe he regrets it a little. 

Stilted, with Jinyoung still trying to work through his own shock, they eventually agree that they should move out.

…

Jaebeom _does not_. Or at least, he doesn’t like the idea of making Jinyoung and Jackson pay higher rent.

It’s one of those things where Jinyoung and Jaebeom are equally stubborn, equally right in their own selfish, misguided ways – and Jackson should side with his hyung. 

“Hyung, he’s right, I barely live in my own apartment anymore,” he prompts gently when Jaebeom breaks out of his argument of cut-off breaths and frustrated, flashing looks with Jinyoung.

In the end, he sides with Jinyoung, and Jaebeom shuts them both out of the bedroom. 

Granted, it’s only for a few hours past midnight, but Jackson is already tired of trying to sleep on the couch again, half-propped against Jinyoung’s rigid shoulder. He immediately latches on when Jaebeom shuffles out, murmuring apologies as he rouses them, a kiss over a brow, a palm on a cheek. 

“I just, it’s been so long.” He shifts in place, in the nest of blankets between Jackson and Jinyoung, in a place filled with Jinyoung’s annotated textbooks, Jackson’s weekend hoodies, and his own torn paperback novels. 

He sighs, and it’s his _home_ , where it smells like everything he wants belongs right where it should be. 

Jinyoung nuzzles into his neck from behind, tells him it’s his final say. 

“It won’t change anything,” Jackson nods adamantly. No matter what glittering penthouse or neighborhood condo they end up in, it’s still going to be the three of them. Just with two bedrooms this time. 

Jaebeom sighs but he makes a reminder to check his savings. Jackson clings to his waist as tight as he can, and Jinyoung lays close enough to cover his nape with his cheek.

…

 _Is it an omega thing_ , Jackson wonders as Jaebeom bothers the estate agent for the 5th time about something like the tile foundation of the bathroom floor. 

When Jaebeom begins examining the kitchen from the seams of its counter to the stove mechanism, Jinyoung meets his eyes over Jaebeom’s shoulder and shakes his head minutely. 

When they do settle in, the thorough cleaning is at least expected. 

“We need to clean the toilet,” Jaebeom prompts, coming to stand between the two of them.

Jackson and Jinyoung pause in their confusion over a vacuum filter that won’t come loose from the actual vacuum. 

The toilet has to be cleaned, and it has to be one of them because they’d never let Jaebeom do it with his back. A lasting symptom of fucked up heats, old aches flare up from the base of his spine to his stomach whenever pushed too hard. Jinyoung shamefully knows through experience. 

The dusty filter finally pops free in Jinyoung’s clenched grip. 

“Our Jinyoungie is the best, he should help~!,” Jackson sing-songs, immediately relieving him of the vacuum, leaving him to face Jaebeom’s expectant stare empty-handed. 

In the end, Jinyoung is still reeling from the betrayal as he stares blankly at the odd bristled brush in his hand. 

Maybe it is an omega thing, the extreme fussiness over _home_ , where Jaebeom fidgets with each and every thing, but when they have to move the couch back a few inches for the third time, Jackson and Jinyoung do so without protest. 

-

“Hyung likes banana milk the best~” Jackson waves at Jaebeom through the busy window of the shop. 

“You think I don’t know that already,” Jinyoung scoffs, and yet, he’s smiling back with his curling eye-whiskers. It’s not a bad look at all. Jackson openly admires him, casual in the tentative morning light with his posh student glasses and neat hair.

“Well, you only drink black coffee.” Jackson sticks out his tongue. “Gross.” 

Jinyoung automatically reaches out as Jaebeom places his burning hot coffee in his waiting palm.

“Says the one who lives off of watered-down sugar and cream every day.” His drink pulses, searing against his fingers, and he sips at it, scalding and almost tasteless, just the way he likes it. 

Jackson splutters about how iced lattes are the perfect work drinks while Jaebeom takes the opportunity to tap his dripping cup against his cheek. His loud laugh, Jackson’s surprised shout, and Jinyoung’s muffled snickers mix into the morning bustle with ease. 

-

There are some nights where bad habits come back to haunt them, and it’s with a swirling mix of desperation and dependency that Jackson turns first to Jaebeom, eyes clenched shut in a silent plea. 

Jaebeom walks with him, their hands laced tightly between them, to an old convenience store where cherry blossoms fall in the spring and turn into green shade for the bench across the road in the summer. Jackson quietly accepts the carton of cold chocolate milk as hyung sips on his own banana milk next to him, eyes swollen in sleepy slits.

When the shivers don’t stop, even with Jackson tucked into his side in the moth-ridden shadows of the street lamps, Jaebeom slides to the ground with an aching sigh of his tailbone against the loose sidewalk corner. 

With Jackson’s knees spread around his broad shoulders, he lifts shaking fingers to his bare nape, his ruffled hair. 

Awkward, scared tremors become smooth, habitual, even teasing touches. Jaebeom coos from somewhere deep in his chest and leans back with an occasional flutter of his lashes. 

He stays there, and Jackson fits his thumbs over every soft crook of his jaw to make sure of it. 

“Hehe,” Jackson snuggles unabashedly against him, boxing him in with his cheek rubbing over his hair. “Did you do this for Jinyoungie too?”

On his stiff knees, looking up at Jackson’s adoring expression, Jaebeom’s open affection becomes pure mortification. “Well, not exactly — like this.” 

When they get back, Jinyoung is sipping on a can of iced cocoa, waiting for them. Despite the way Jaebeom flushes slightly when their eyes meet, he pulls Jaebeom to him with chilled fingers and tells Jackson to just wake him up next time. 

_ask me to be nice and i’ll do it extra mean_

There are times they find themselves slipping, Jinyoung letting his hands linger over Jaebeom’s stomach when it’s curved around his knot, Jaebeom brushing his hair aside as he absentmindedly tilts his neck for Jinyoung’s heavy gaze. 

\- and it’s so easy, so instinctual, until it’s not. Because in the end, it’s never that easy between them.

Jinyoung wants to be gentle and hold Jaebeom with only the lightest of bruises. Make it so that every pleading whine he seems to be so ashamed of falls louder, more desperate, because Jinyoung knows how to take care of him. He’ll push, but with only a hint of pressure. Only enough to see Jaebeom’s body give way, pink under the imprint of his fingers. 

The impulse is still there. With Jaebeom bared and willing beneath him, he wants to push him even farther, fuck him into neat and tidy pieces. Cup him in his palms, curled up and shuddering for Jinyoung only. Tell Jaebeom if he can take it, _to be a good little omega slut for him_ , _he’ll tie him up nice and full with his knot_ , _maybe even put a pup in him._

He wants Jaebeom to trust him enough to beg for him. Call Jinyoung _alpha_ and ask to be ruined with tears smeared sweetly on his lips. 

It’s bound to bad, when he’s still re-learning ways to touch Jaebeom without being cruel. Jinyoung is an alpha, Jaebeom, an omega, and between any other pair, it’d be simple talk, play, but for them, it's never that easy.

_to make me forget my hesitation, please reach out and take my hand again_

Jaebeom must be messed up in the head - to want it like this after everything that’s happened.

It’s everything aching and perfect when Jinyoung spreads his thighs open as if his skin was flower petals on silk. As if he was something that could bruise with even one breath. He’s frustrated, and adoringly so when Jinyoung pauses with every other kiss and touch to ask him if he’s okay with those worried, patient eyes. And when he’s shaking and beyond tears as Jinyoung makes him come first, he’s always held steady through every choked sound in the aftermath.

So why is it, when Jinyoung knows exactly how to be gentle with him, he doesn’t seem to understand that Jaebeom wants him to be rough, to push him beyond his hesitant breath and give him what he needs. Needs Jinyoung to fold him in half and make his hips ache from how hard he pushes inside, leave him bruises that won’t fade in time, on parts of his neck that a pressed collar can’t cover. Call Jaebeom all the terrible things he isn’t and yet wants to be when they fall from Jinyoung’s quirked lips, to not stop until Jaebeom is falling apart just for him -

-and then, because he’s _Jinyoung_ , he’ll kiss him and clean him up, neat and perfect after everything is over, so bad, it’s good again. 

He wants to beg shamelessly enough that Jinyoung will let go of his wonderful, cautious pretenses and ruin him. He wants to trust him enough to do all of this, but after everything, Jaebeom is still just a fucked up omega.

_make it better, hold you tighter_

It slips out, as Jinyoung watches Jaebeom’s mouth loll around a pink tongue, eyes going hazy as he locks around Jinyoung’s knot.

“You take my knot so well don’t you?”

Jaebeom shakes, jerking his head, but he lets out a high pleading sound when Jinyoung cradles his cheek, stroking across the wet trail of his cheek with his thumb.

He’s completely possessive, endeared, as the words slip free. “That’s right, my good little omega slut.”

Jaebeom spasms around him, coming with his eyes shock-wide open - as if he couldn’t believe it, a pure gut reaction for Jinyoung alone. Jinyoung gapes down at him too, unable to stop his hips from thrusting forward, desperately, one last time.

In that moment, Jaebeom pants and shakes against him. He clutches desperately at Jinyoung’s shirt, hiding his tears against his chest, and no matter what, no matter how fucked up they may be, Jinyoung holds him through it all.

When he apologizes, trembling at the terrible sound of his own voice, Jaebeom smothers his mouth with wet kisses. When Jaebeom cradles his cheeks, it feels like they might still be okay if they can keep touching one another like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know there was a lot of pain, but also resolve in some ways right! i am also very tired of writing sex scenes that immediately transition into hURT sex scenes -- but u know...tender yet aching comfort in physicality and all that. anyway next chapter is the last and i promise you it's going to just be domestic fluff. thank u for reading this far in this small continuation! please let me know how this chapter was for you!
> 
> hmu!: [*](https://twitter.com/happycakecries)


	4. finish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jinyoung lip freckle ref [here](https://twitter.com/nyeongbeom_/status/1275789244498415617)!

_touch and figure it out_

There is no way to forget a scar, and so, there is nothing more to rut but an aftermath of fading pain and flinching touches.

Jaebeom doesn’t know how to breathe when Jinyoung looks down at him like that. His eyes fixated on the bare strip of his throat, dark and intense and _wanting_.

So he always turns away, curling into a pillow as he wraps a hand around his bare nape. His body shakes whenever Jinyoung pushes into him, gouging so deep, it’s like he’s trying to mold Jaebeom to the shape of his cock.

He turns into himself, enough for him to feel the bare length of his spine stretch too tight beneath skin. But he can’t look, not when Jinyoung’s teeth graze over the huddled line of his shoulders, snag on the bruises of his knuckles.

Despite that, Jinyoung never bites.

It leaves Jaebeom gasping with pure relief and something even more painful twisting inside his empty stomach at the end of rut. Jinyoung sits at his back, the almost-press of his skin the only comfort he can offer without touching Jaebeom again.

There are still bruises and aches and scratches, only skin-deep, but neither of them can bear to look at each other.

That’s how it is with old pains and scars – they flare up and leave an itch, a reminder of what's there when you find yourself picking at it absentmindedly. Jaebeom has to force himself to not shy away from Jinyoung’s arm, and Jinyoung will shut himself in Jackson’s room in obstinate silence when he can’t breathe through the headiness of Jaebeom’s scent on his teeth.

Jackson doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t think he ever will. Only that as much as they need to be around one another, they need the distance even more sometimes. He takes those odd, spacious nights to spread across the bed and reassure Jinyoung with his own stilted, quiet breaths.

Somehow, they make up. They always do in that mysterious way, with Jaebeom’s gentle hum on their new balcony as Jinyoung hauls himself upright against his shoulder, watching a pink dawn soften the sky.

-

Sometimes Jackson doesn’t understand, and at other times, he misconstrues it entirely.

It’s usually with a few knocks on the door followed by a plaintive whine, “– Don’t be so mean to one another. And quiet down!” 

At least Jinyoung is considerate enough to stop until he’s wrapping a pillow around his head, muffling himself to sleep.

Still, Jaebeom practically expires when Jackson scooches up to him, just the two of them, tentatively, carefully on their walk home. It’s with wide, genuine worry that he tells him about the things he hears Jinyoung say in that lowly satisfied tone through the walls of their room.

“After all, making love should be gentle,” he finishes with a self-assured nod, and Jaebeom has no idea how he could say that so shamelessly. 

He doesn’t explain, _he could never_ to Jackson of all people, but there are at least a few more nights than usual where Jackson is tucked contentedly, sleeping sound, in the same space between them.

…

The lap sitting is not an inherently sexual thing.

For someone like Jaebeom, with his broad shoulders and stocky legs, it’s never quite comfortable being held when he’s used to draping himself over someone instead.

Case in point: Jackson is very much smothered in affection, twenty-one years into his adult life.

Jinyoung, who never says anything, who is in general neatly reserved in his affections, has no problem with hauling Jaebeom over his thighs and wrapping his arms loosely around his waist. Somehow, Jaebeom fits, his hips nestled right into the seam of Jinyoung’s small lap.

Jinyoung is shorter, tighter in his toned arms and slight chest, but it’s almost perfect when Jaebeom finally relaxes back against him. He tugs Jaebeom a little closer then, leaning into the feeling of his fingers steepled over Jaebeom’s stomach. 

Jackson ends up finding Jaebeom curled up in Jinyoung’s lap more often than he expects – and it’s usually just overlapping shoulders and ducked heads as they read over boring numbers reports together, but there is (1) incident.

It’s an almost unnecessary precaution, but he takes to yelling “are you decent?” before he ever enters a room with just Jaebeom on Jinyoung’s lap again. 

_in retrospect (2), up to now, it’s been us all along_

When Yugyeom comes to visit, Jinyoung watches Jaebeom fall in love with his half-brother practically on the spot - spindly legs, a head of dandelion fluff, and all.

“Hello,” he bows shyly in the way that he would never do for Jinyoung, “I’m Kim Yugyeom.”

He rises to his full height, fussing with his bangs so bashfully that there are now _hearts_ in Jaebeom’s eyes.

Jinyoung is distinctly lost as to whether he should be upset with Yugyeom or Jaebeom when Yugyeom naturally folds into Jaebeom’s hug first with a cheery _hyung-nim~._

…

Yugyeom is Jinyoung’s brother, and there are parts of Jinyoung worn so clearly on the crinkling corners of his eyes, how he tries so hard with his earnest words – all of it, if only just a touch sweeter.

Jaebeom sees the part of him that’s as innocent as a child, and he’s so endeared.

“You’re going too far, hyung,” Jinyoung says in a tone that’s almost a whine. But he would never, never pout for Jaebeom’s attention like this. He’s simply being the logical one here because buying groceries based exclusively on Yugyeom’s (shit) taste are not the actions of someone with common sense.

It’s certainly not what a doting Jaebeom has in mind as he texts Yugyeom in their private Kakao chat.

“He’s going to get used to being spoiled if you keep this up,” Jinyoung tries again, adamantly following Jaebeom as he turns sharply down the aisle. 

Jaebeom only contemplates a 24-pack of chocolate milk, complete with sippy straws and dancing cows before dumping it into their cart. 

Jaebeom finally pauses before the glossy glass front of the in-store bakery.

“As if,” he scoffs, and he fixes Jinyoung with a hard look through his reflection in the glass. “You’ve already done everything for him first.” 

Jinyoung doesn’t know what to say to that. Jaebeom orders a box of fresh milk-bread and pushes him over to the daily tea specials. 

His phone buzzes with a text message from Yugyeom. Attached is a picture of Jackson slung under his arm, both of them grinning from the balcony with the breathless view of the street below the railing. 

_missing you hyung!_

(If Yugyeom leaves later that day, tucked full from convenience store hot-pot, cheeks flushed adoringly from the constant attention, Jinyoung can pretend that the last hug he pulls him into is just to tease him further.

Yugyeom smiles sweetly against his neck and leans down so Jinyoung can latch onto his shoulders anyway). 

-

“Jackson would be great with kids,” Jinyoung notes idly in the still moment after Jaebeom turns off the light.

Jaebeom shifts, his back turned to Jinyoung. He replies an off-beat later. “Jinyoung, you know I’m on birth control.”

“I know.” Jinyoung innocently wraps around him, resting his cheek on the familiar bare warmth of Jaebeom’s nape. The longer bits of Jaebeom’s mullet tickle with the clean scent of soap and shampoo against his skin. “Just saying.”

Jaebeom huffs, a long exhale. “Yeah,” he admits, and Jinyoung can hear the way he’s hiding a smile into the pillow. “He really would be.”

Jackson’s eyes light up when he sees little kids in passing, their chubby hands gripping at their mother’s fingers. 

Jinyoung can’t say he’s ever had the same immediate reaction, but he does feel a strange little twinge when Yugyeom resorts to whining in his sweet, hazy voice. 

Jackson looks at toddlers with the same tender regard he has for Jaebeom now - adoring, excited, and so, so smitten.

-

“Youngjae,” Jaebeom slides back against the younger man’s desk with a teary yawn, “how is your dog?”

Despite the absolute blank look on his face, Youngjae immediately scrolls through his rapidly growing album of Coco posed in various glamour shots from their scenic garden walks.

Jaebeom coos accordingly over all of them, and in return, he turns his phone to himself, carefully choosing a few photos before he shows Youngjae.

He can see Jackson’s familiar grin, caught ducking into the frame, but at the center, is a young man with strong brows and quirked lips. In the bright shade, he has a proud, cat-like handsomeness to him.

It’s definitely not the usual street cat pictures Jaebeom exchanges with him, but Youngjae tentatively asks anyway.

“Is that...”

Jaebeom lets out a little _oh_. Then, he settles with a smile that makes his glasses scrunch up past his cheeks. “My partner - Jinyoung.”

Youngjae returns his approval accordingly. “Very cute.”

As Jaebeom goes soft with the remaining slideshow of domestic breakfasts and blurred profiles against the sunset, Youngjae runs through how much of the accumulating office betting pool could cover the price of a Gucci dog collar.

Scratch that, the collar and the leash set, at least.

-

Jaebeom and Jinyoung always read one another, even if Jaebeom is halfway across the room, facing the TV, and Jinyoung is burning the rice again under Jackson’s ever-suffering tutelage.

On the other hand, Jaebeom curls around Jackson whenever he needs it the most during hazy half-dreams, but he realizes a part of hyung will always be a mystery to him.

“Anyone could guess what you’re thinking,” Jinyoung tells him with barely a blink, but he raises his arm and lets Jackson dig his head obnoxiously into his shoulder anyway as they wait for Jaebeom in the hood of the soaked bus stop. 

Jaebeom drips over the both of them when he arrives and Jackson is worried for a moment, for Jinyoung’s curled hair, the woven fabric of his finely creased coat. His general disposition towards hot or damp weather is one of calm distaste. 

Under the crashing lull of summer rain, Jackson’s forehead soaks into Jaebeom’s flushed cheek as Jinyoung pulls them both closer, blinking a bright drop out of his eye. Running out, they’re all drenched completely, together, and Jinyoung’s carefree laughter on the arc of splashing puddles surprises him again and again. 

-

“I bulk up too easily,” Jaebeom pouts, lounging on the bed for a lazy Sunday noon.

“I mean it’s not like I want to be super thin like...an omega,” Jaebeom supplies, awkwardly answering Jinyoung’s questioning look as he stands there, tousling absentmindedly at his loose hair. 

He trails off, eyes on Jinyoung’s casual shirt and shorts, the dampness of his forehead beneath a messy curl, before he rolls over, lamely muffling his words, “-or something.”

Jinyoung drapes his sweaty front over Jaebeom’s back and digs his nose into the folds of his hoodie. When he finds the familiar mix of Jaebeom’s scent, he smacks a kiss against the top of his spine.

“But you are an omega.” He happily basks there, nuzzling deeper into the clean warmth mixed with his own heavy sweat. “And I like that you’re bigger than me.”

“Shut up,” Jaebeom grumbles, but Jinyoung knows he doesn’t mean it. A hand comes up to rest at the back of his head, not pushing him away or pulling him closer - but it stays there, a constant presence. “You and your weird kinks.”

Jinyoung is allowed to play at being cute in Jackson’s momentary absence. “But you are my kink, Jaebeomie-hyung~”

Scandalized at almost-nothing, Jackson kicks him off to shower first.

_first to say hello, good morning, goodnight, goodbye, and---_

Jinyoung blinks groggily in the space of a sigh, the rasp of his knuckles over Jaebeom’s cheek.

He sits up with a shift of the blankets, face set in a pout. Jaebeom dozes with parted lips, completely lax in the early shades of morning.

Jinyoung kisses him through his small hitch of breath, greeting him with the tickle of his own exhale.

“ _hi,"_

Jaebeom’s eyes slide shut again on a seam of sunshine. He holds Jinyoung there, hovering, bare and adoring over him.

_“-hello."_

_-_

“Morning,” Jaebeom slides into place besides Youngjae on their lift to the basement. He yawns, holding a styrofoam cup to his nose to let the steam mist over his glasses and the swollen skin underneath.

“Good morning, hyung.” Youngjae checks his watch noncommittally.

The background picture is a new Coco shot, cut perfectly to the dimensions of the tiny screen. They pass two more floors before Jaebeom ducks over and Youngjae willingly tells him about the new botanical garden just two stops outside of the usual subway line to work.

Youngjae swipes through the trail Coco walked and Jaebeom promises to show it to Jinyoung and Jackson on the next odd day off.

-

“Go to bed already, Nyoungie.”

Jackson smacks a hand lightly across his head just to be even more annoying. In the dim light of the tiny table-lamp, Jinyoung droops a touch too far from his palm alone. 

He leans over, and Jinyoung’s lashes are brushing over his glasses, reflecting the mottled words of the open textbook below. Business school, huh?

Jackson turns off the light, wincing at how intense Jinyoung’s messy studying looks in the dark, dumps out Jinyoung’s grimy coffee, and hauls his barely protesting body off to bed.

Between him and Jaebeom, Jinyoung grumbles something like “ _ugh_ ” and _“thanks, Jackson_.”

Jackson takes it as a goodnight and returns it likewise.

“Goodnight, Jinyoung.”

-

Jinyoung can hear something like rustling over Yugyeom’s whiny static.

" _Goodnight_ , Yugyeom-“ he says pointedly when a click like the room lights being turned off sounds from the background.

“No,” Yugyeom gasps into the speaker, even louder and whinier. “My roommate doesn’t care, don’t hang up yet, hyung.”

Again from the background – a frustrated groan that tapers off into the end of Yugyeom’s name.

Jinyoung laughs, despite his own reservations about late nights at school. “Be considerate Gyeomie. You can come visit when you’re free.”

“Really?” Yugyeom’s hushed whisper comes out in a rush of excitement past the slow midnight hour. “Then I’m hitting you guys up next week!”

Jinyoung hums noncommittally into the speaker. “Goodnight, Yugyeom.”

“Ah – wait, hyung wait~”

“Goodbye.”

Yugyeom fusses desperately until he realizes Jinyoung is still on the line, only waiting with a light doze and a chuckle.

“Okay,” he breathes out on a pause. “Goodbye, hyung!”

-

There is a scattering of freckles and moles all over Jaebeom. Not close enough to be a constellation, but they mark him anyway from lid to cheek to chest. 

Like dots of ink or stars spread in the dark – Jinyoung fits his lips gently to each of them.

There is no bite on his nape, but Jaebeom bares his chest for Jinyoung’s mouth on the spot to the right of his collarbone, a north star shifted slightly from his heart.

There are no more marks, but there are other ways of belonging.

Jaebeom kisses him on his mouth, on the lightest inflection of his curved upper-lip, the tiniest freckle there -

“ _i_ _love you_ ”

_it’s a family affair_

Jackson opens the door to Yugyeom’s bright smile, and he instantly pulls him in with excited surprise.

Yugyeom lets himself lean down awkwardly, tucked under Jackson’s iron grip.

“Why are you here so soon Yugyeom? Don’t you have school?”

Yugyeom’s blinding smile combined with his loud, cheery announcement makes Jinyoung choke from the next room over.

“I’m here to take hyung ring shopping!”

“—Kim Yugyeom, we did not agree on this,” he hisses, hauling an open-mouthed Jaebeom behind him the entire time.

He sweats through Yugyeom’s shrieking laughter and Jackson’s slow but rapidly panicking realization, but Jaebeom’s fingers stay, locked steadily around his own.

_bonus: winner takes all_

The entire office inhales on a new breath in the drudgery of afternoon as a young man with hair curled over his brow and a self-assured smile leans over their boss’s desk with clear intimacy.

“Yah -- happy birthday, Park Jinyoung!” Jackson crows from across the room.

A whole year’s worth of insults over greasy pizza with beer, hypotheticals posed on the dregs of morning office coffee, and of course, the betting pool is all lost as Jaebeom tucks his fingers around Jinyoung’s neck and pulls him down for a kiss.

Youngjae settles for buying a two-tiered dog bed, complete with tiny steps fashioned out of white cedar. He sends Jaebeom a picture of Coco settling on the top cushion like the princess she is, and he gets a picture of Jinyoung scrunching his face through a haze of thick cream cake, Jackson happily and clearly responsible for it behind him, and Jaebeom’s peace-sign blurring the shot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *takes breath* wow ok it's done, i have a lot of feelings. first things first, this chapter is so lighthearted and simple and it almost doesn't fit, but i wrote all these small scenes b/c i wanted to! just some final snapshots of domesticity b/c i think it's finally time for a happy ending in the only way jjj can have it - being able to fit together at the end of everything. also i pre-wrote most of these scenes, so it was nice and easy to just work them in haha. pls enjoy youngjae and his dog bed at the very end of all this :)  
> also i know...jjj threesome may have been a thought, but i don't think i could've done it well for this story. i wanted to show how imperfect it is for the three of them to be together - and then despite that, they still make it work. and it doesn't work out sometimes, but that's ok. so beyond clear romance or friendship, it's just three people learning to coexist b/c in some way, being together makes life a bit easier and harder at the same time.  
> anyway, hah, this series is over now and i am taking a deep sigh for it. my first big project, i've been hanging onto it for a while after i posted the first work, so much so that the inevitable second part was really weighing on my mind the longer i stewed over it. in my own retrospection, it feels like i got so invested in the heavy conflicts b/t jjj beyond abo that they were practically demanding a resolve and i suffered through all their complications for their happy ending. so damn - please be happy now! i did this for u so u better live in domestic bliss!!! will miss u!!
> 
> don't read that i was just ranting but thank YOU for reading! it's just a small minuscule series but if you took the time to follow through these vague, emotional complications - i'm glad :) please leave me w your parting thoughts.  
> hope to be back soon!  
> hmu! [*](https://twitter.com/happycakecries)


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